Hopeful visions of reorganized Clark County School District

Monday, Oct. 19, 2015 | 2 a.m.

There’s no single blueprint for how to successfully operate a huge school district. But if the challenges have any correlation to size, it’s little wonder the Clark County School District is struggling to find a structure that works.

Clark County’s is the fifth largest school district in the country, and one of the fastest growing, with more than 310,000 students. It is culturally and socioeconomically diverse and underfunded for its task, with crowded campuses and a crippling shortage of teachers. By various measures, student achievement lags behind the rest of the country. And there’s concern that the district is too big and bureaucratic to be sensitive to the community it serves.

The 2015 Legislature felt that way and ordered the school district to reorganize into minidistricts, or “local school precincts,” that would be more responsive to the needs and concerns of residents. The Clark County School District would oversee the school precincts and operate overarching functions including food services, transportation, maintenance and human resources. The school district also would run districtwide academies, magnets and other specialty schools.

Lawmakers gave the school district until the 2018-19 school year to reorganize. We applaud Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky for jumping on the task. On Oct. 12, he unveiled his plan, and it’s one that makes a lot of sense to us.

Skorkowsky set up his recommendations by noting efforts through the years to make the district more manageable through reorganization.

• In 1995, a high-powered consulting group considered several options and concluded that it was not possible to break Clark County into 10 school districts, because of unavoidable disparities in relative wealth and among minority populations. It would have triggered desegregation litigation and other insurmountable roadblocks.

• In 2001, Superintendent Carlos Garcia reorganized the district into five regions, with regional superintendents responsible for instruction and operations. Their hands were full.

• In 2009, Superintendent Walt Rulffes dumped the five regions in favor of four “area service centers” that each provided services to school administrators, teachers, students and parents in those particular service areas.

• In 2012, Superintendent Dwight Jones cut the number of area service centers from four to three and created 15 performance zones. Academic managers in each were singularly focused on and accountable for improving student achievement in their zone, while an associate superintendent was responsible for operational support. It turned out, the academic managers were distracted and unable to ignore operational issues.

Skorkowsky, a district veteran who participated in earlier efforts of management reform, was appointed superintendent in 2013. He kept Jones’ performance zones but also established districtwide strategies and goals, which were consolidated in 2014 and branded as the Pledge of Achievement. They included increasing third-grade reading proficiency, closing the achievement gap between high performers and ethnic/racial subgroups, improving the high school graduation rate, increasing parental involvement, increasing the number of students who feel safe and happy at school and growing the number of students completing advanced placement and career-and-technical education courses.

In his report to the committee overseeing the district’s reorganization, Skorkowsky said the performance zones weren’t accomplishing their purpose. He supports reorganizing the district into seven instructional precincts, one for each of the School Board trustee districts. Each would have an advisory board and be headed by a precinct superintendent responsible for crafting and instituting instructional programs and hiring faculty to meet schools’ specific needs.

Here’s one of the many reasons we like Skorkowsky’s plan: The precinct superintendent would report to the district superintendent and be held accountable for the academic success of his or her precinct. When we’re talking about what’s at stake involving our children, it’s good that people will be held accountable.