In April, San Francisco’s Ida B. Wells High School had an astonishingly high chronic absenteeism rate of nearly 96%.

It’s an emergency hidden in plain sight: hundreds of thousands of California kids and young adults aren’t in school or working.

And no one seems to know for sure where they are or what they’re doing.

In 2022, more than 1 in 10 Californians ages 16 to 24 — nearly half a million youth — were “disconnected,” meaning they weren’t in school, employed or looking for a job, according to data crunched by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

This figure isn’t as high as during the aftermath of the Great Recession in 2011, but in some ways, it’s more concerning.

Today’s youth are doubly disconnected. They came of age during COVID lockdowns, enduring significant learning loss and missing out on critical social development. Largely left to their own devices by the state — which spent the past few years fighting a parent lawsuit alleging that its lengthy school closures and remote learning policies disproportionately harmed low-income students, before finally agreeing to a $2 billion settlement — these youth are once again being abandoned.

The scope of the problem may be even bigger than we realize.

Last week, the state Department of Education released 2023-24 school year data showing that enrollment in public schools continues to decline despite growing signups for transitional kindergarten, a new grade for 4-year-olds. The department noted this decline can’t fully be attributed to kids fleeing for charter or private schools. Although private school enrollment is up since the pandemic, it’s still lower than it was........

© San Francisco Chronicle