KANAS CITY, Mo. — It’s been a challenging time for everyone, especially students. Educators say remote learning is harming some students.

One local group is hoping to change this. 

“Kids are disengaging in the education system all the time for a variety of reasons,” United Inner City Services CEO Deidre Anderson said. 

Anderson said many students aren’t showing up for online class — and that’s concerning.

“So this is going to have long standing effects in the way that kids are going to be engaging in schools because of the fact that their attendance and enrollment in preschool isn’t exactly what wanted to be,” Anderson said.

But SchoolAppKC Director Leslie Kohlmeyer with Show Me KC Schools is working to fix this problem with a new task force.

“Really all I wanted to walk away from that meeting is to identify that there is a problem, to talk about it, to hear from first-hand experience because I can’t provide data yet,” she said.

She said the group is tackling under-enrollment in pre-K and kindergarten students and high school dropouts. Kohlmeyer said another reason for under-enrollment is students helping out at home. 

“I thought another really impactful statement was a student who the parents were working, but then he was then in charge of his siblings’ online learning. So he was having to manage their school work and couldn’t get to his own,” Kohlmeyer said. 

“What I hope to see come out of this task force is that we will collectively come together, raise the awareness of the general public what the issue really is,” Andersons said.