Moonlighting principal ushers in dramatic changes at struggling school

By Ian Whitaker

Thursday, April 9, 2015 | 9:15 p.m.

When Walter Long Elementary School’s new principal Katie Decker arrived at the school a few weeks ago, the first thing she did was take a walk around the campus.

It didn’t take her long to identify what needed fixing: The exterior of the east Las Vegas school was drab and colorless. Parents waited in the parking lot after school rather than come inside to pick their children up. Teachers didn’t have enough time to prepare during the day and closets in classrooms could only be described as “hot messes,” according to Decker.

So she rewrote the budget. To free up teachers, she hired support staff. She changed the way kids entered the school in the morning to avoid having them walk through a foreboding set of iron bars and opened the front gate for parents to come get them at the end of the day. To spruce the place up, she called in favors from local landscapers and charity groups as well as Caesars Entertainment, which was already a school sponsor.

It was nothing new for Decker. The changes she made are some of the same she brought to nearby Walter Bracken Elementary over the past decade to turn it into a nationally recognized Blue Ribbon School. She’s still the principal there too, a kind of guinea pig in a new CCSD program that puts star principals in charge of struggling schools to try to replicate their success.

On Thursday afternoon, dozens of volunteers poured into Walter Long to help complete a brand-new school garden.

“I’m here to turn this school into a five-star school,” Decker said before volunteers, teachers and students in the school’s cafeteria. “We’re going to start by changing the environment.”

Volunteers grabbed paintbrushes and shovels and went to work pouring soil and painting walls and the asphalt where kids play hopscotch. After an hour, a dull blue stripe that formerly circled the school’s exterior was already a rainbow of oranges, yellows, greens and reds.

“I’ve been here for 12 years and I’ve seen a lot of changes at this school,” said third-grade teacher Conni Dunham. “I think this is what I’ve been waiting for.”

The one-star school needed Decker’s fast-paced style of leadership because it was “too used to the CCSD pace,” Dunham said. “Slow and steady.”

Decker is everywhere at once. One minute she’s on the staff radio with a question, the next she’s joking with a student. She never stops making plans for a new decoration or improvement.