CCSD seeing good results by expanding star principals’ territory

By Ian Whitaker

Tuesday, March 8, 2016 | 2 a.m.

When Clark County School District officials announced last April that two of their star principals would be overseeing more than one school this year, people had a lot of questions.

The most obvious one was: How on earth can a principal, who already has one of the hardest jobs in education, have time to double his or her workload?

But fast-forward a year, and the skeptics have largely been silenced. Last week, Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky announced the pilot program would be expanded, and the principals involved so far say it has been a stunning success.

“It’s not as hard as people think,” said Katie Decker, who brought her success as principal of award-winning magnet school Bracken Elementary to Long Elementary this school year.

When she arrived, she immediately began making changes. She replaced underperforming teachers, trained a competent group of administrators and began rebuilding the two-star school’s reputation among parents in the community.

The results have been obvious at Long, a previously drab-looking school that now resembles a rainbow after Decker had it painted by students and volunteers. The school exemplifies Decker’s approach to turning around schools: getting the community to “buy in” to their success. A number of hallways in the school have been adopted by Caesars Entertainment employees, local landscapers helped build a garden and now Decker wants to construct a running track.

“I'm really optimistic,” she said.

Meanwhile, in the west Las Vegas Valley, Roundy Elementary Principal John Haynal has achieved similar results. He was given the reins of Vegas Verdes Elementary this school year and will oversee Wynn Elementary next school year as part of the program’s expansion. All three schools are within a short drive of each other.

Haynal’s success comes from applying business-management techniques he learned as a CitiBank manager, establishing a system in which everyone at the school is responsible for maintaining a high-quality educational environment.

Perhaps his biggest achievement recently has been keeping the number of vacant teaching positions at both schools extremely low. While the teacher shortage has ravaged many inner city schools in Las Vegas, Haynal has largely avoided it by putting a big emphasis on what he calls his “bench.” Through relentless recruiting of students from UNLV’s education college and by word of mouth from his own teachers, he has compiled a list of fully qualified teachers ready to step in just in case someone leaves.

“We have depth galore,” Haynal said. “Whenever transfer season starts, we contact the bench and sign them up.”

And, like Decker, he’s trained a team of administrators ready to take over many of principal's duties at Roundy and Vegas Verdes once he shifts his focus to Wynn.

But Haynal thinks the franchise program can go even farther than giving a few successful principals control over an extra school. With the addition of Wynn Elementary under his belt, Haynal has essentially been given the challenge of building a cluster of quality schools within a small area.

He thinks this “cluster” model, where a dedicated team of administrators work to roll out a proven system in schools within specific neighborhoods, can be replicated across the valley.

“The key for us is using the model we built to keep finding these young leaders,” he said. “There are enough quality people here that I can see clusters of good schools all over this city.”

Decker agreed. “It just takes the right person,” she said.

While the turnaround of Long and Vegas Verdes is obvious when you visit the school, supporters of the franchise program will have to wait a little longer to make it official. Last year’s problems with the Smarter Balanced standardized test, which was a disaster for elementary schools in Las Vegas, means it hasn’t been possible to compare each school’s academic performance with previous years. A lack of capacity in the testing company's servers prevented thousands of students from logging in to take the online test.

Because of that, the school’s two-star ratings have been carried over from the 2013-14 academic year.

Along with Haynal taking over Wynn, the expansion of the franchise program will also see Las Vegas High School Principal Debbie Brockett take over Keller Middle School.