Children scream during a holiday gift giveaway event at C.T. Sewell Elementary School in Henderson Friday, Dec. 16, 2022.
Sunday, Dec. 18, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Eva White used the “my kid” rule when making decisions as an elementary school principal and central office administrator in the Clark County School District: Is this something she would want for her own child? If so, she wanted it for someone else’s child.
White helped draft the latest proposed law to break up CCSD by allowing cities within Clark County to withdraw and start their own school districts.
Last month, the group behind the Community Schools Initiative submitted more than 220,000 petition signatures from around the state to put the matter before the Nevada Legislature when it convenes in February; they only need about 141,000 of the signatures to be valid for the initiative to advance.
Counties have until Friday to verify the signatures, and then once again proponents will put into lawmakers’ hands what backers have been trying to create for 30 years: multiple, smaller school districts for Southern Nevada. If lawmakers decline to approve the proposal, it will automatically be placed before voters.
Assuming the most optimistic timeline, any deconsolidation of CCSD is still about three years off.
The continued wait would be worth it, White said.
“If the children don’t benefit, then it’s not worth doing,” she said.
CCSD is the fifth-largest school district by enrollment in the United States, with roughly 300,000 students in more than 350 schools in an area encompassing more than 476 square miles.
Rhode Island, which is just over twice the geographic size of Clark County, by contrast, has 66 school districts, or local education agencies as they’re known there, overseeing 316 public schools with a combined enrollment of about 144,000 students.
Idaho, which has an enrollment of about 311,000 in its public schools — the state closest to CCSD’s enrollment — has 178 districts statewide overseeing 751 schools. But Nevada’s current law, which dates back to 1956, only allows for county-level school districts.
Pro-breakup forces say it is unwieldy, that its sheer size keeps children from getting the education they deserve.
“We feel that it’s imperative that our school districts for all the kids, not just the kids in Henderson, be smaller so that we have a better opportunity for addressing individual needs of students and seeing those success rates improve greatly over time,” said Henderson Mayor-elect Michelle Romero, whose city has 41 of CCSD’s schools. “I don’t think it’s to do with any specific person or any specific lack of interest or trying on anybody’s part. I just think the size of the school district makes it prohibitive for anyone to be successful.”
The initiative is an open-ended piece of proposed legislation that would allow cities, led by residents and city councils, to secede from CCSD and create a new school district within existing municipal boundaries. Henderson City Councilman Dan Stewart, Community Schools Initiative chairman, has characterized it as “enabling legislation” with fundamental differences from prior, unsuccessful deconsolidation efforts.
Past attempts would have established new boundaries from the outset. The latest proposal simply would allow incorporated cities to opt out of their countywide school district if, when and how they choose by local vote, initiated either by council ordinance or a referendum requested by residents.
Although the momentum is in Clark County, it’s a mechanism that any of Nevada’s 19 incorporated cities can use.
The current proposal does not lay out the logistics or price tags of secession. It also doesn’t detail how facilities, individual school zoning, bonds, transportation, food service, staffing, attendance in a specialty program in another city and other programming would be split.
These questions, and answers, would be broached when a city would take steps to secede, White said.
Romero said city staff was researching the results of district breakups elsewhere in the country for guidelines on how Henderson, Nevada’s second-largest city after Las Vegas, could separate.
CCSD officials warn that splitting the district would lead to inequity. National studies wouldn’t do much to assuage that anxiety.
Research has shown that the social outcomes of secession lead to, or deepen, segregation. A 2019 study published in AERA Open, a journal from the American Educational Research Association, found that school district secession in the South had fallen along racial and economic lines. The research found that the breakaway districts were whiter and more affluent than the legacy districts they left behind.
A more recent survey by the federal government affirms this. According to a June report on school diversity by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, many schools are, historically and currently, divided along racial, ethnic and economic lines — and this tends to exacerbate after district breakups.
“Compared to remaining districts, new districts had, on average, roughly triple the share of white students, double the share of Asian students, two-thirds the share of Hispanic students, and one-fifth the share of Black students,” said the 39-page report, which the GAO prepared for the House of Representatives education and labor committee. “New districts were also generally wealthier than remaining districts. Specifically, the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch — a proxy for poverty — was half that of the remaining districts.”
This was generally the case not just in the South — like in Tennessee, where six suburban districts in the Memphis metro splintered off from the county district in 2014, and in Alabama, where six districts have broken apart from their county systems in the past 11 years — but also in Utah, Maine and New Hampshire.
So when six Las Vegas-area chambers of commerce endorsed the Community Schools Initiative in September, CCSD Superintendent Jesus Jara blasted the movement and others like it as creating “civil rights challenges because of deserting less-affluent families and students in the communities with the most needs.” After the group announced its signature haul in November, he reiterated his point, calling the breakup campaign an “easy populist talking point” that points fingers at CCSD and doesn’t address the need for more funding to lift students’ academic achievement.
North Las Vegas Mayor and retired CCSD educator Pamela Goynes-Brown said she had mixed feelings on the movement. As a longtime teacher and assistant principal, she says she knows how hard teachers work and that they yield positive outcomes. But CCSD is large and there’s always room for improvement.
“The biggest fear for me is the difference between equality and equity,” said Goynes-Brown, who grew up in North Las Vegas and retired from CCSD in 2019 after 35 years. “Why can’t kids in North Las Vegas have access to high-quality teachers, access to good curriculum, access to the latest in technology trends? Why is that not happening? Why don’t we have the brightest and the best teachers here? We can get them in after they come from school and then they stay here (some) amount of time and they want to go to different schools.”
As of last week, two of the three schools with the most teacher openings were in North Las Vegas, even though the city is home to only about one in 10 of CCSD’s schools; about a quarter of all teacher openings are in North Las Vegas schools, according to the district’s recruiting webpage. The vacancies reflect what the district reported over the summer, when 26 schools had teacher vacancy rates of at least 20%. Most of these schools were in North Las Vegas or the east valley, which has similar demographics.
About two-thirds of North Las Vegas’ residents are Black and Hispanic. Its per capita income is about 80% of the per capita income in the Vegas valley overall. Fifteen percent of the city lives in poverty.
Conversely, Henderson is a majority-white suburb, middle class or better. It has about as many schools as does North Las Vegas, but only 5% of all of CCSD’s teacher openings. And its students far outperform the district as a whole on standardized tests and graduation rates, according to a report that Applied Analysis prepared for the city this year.
Academically, Henderson is already doing better than its neighbors. But it’s not acceptable for other schools to not do as well as Henderson, said Romero, the incoming mayor.
If this is something she would want for her city’s children, she wants it for all of Clark County’s children.
“Anything we can do to make that possible for every school and for every child, we absolutely have the duty to do that,” she said.
