Henderson City Councilman Dan Stewart poses for a photo at Green Valley High School Thursday, April 21, 2022.
Sunday, April 24, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Anyone who would take another swing at breaking up the Clark County School District, after 30 years of unsuccessful attempts to carve it into smaller, independent districts, would have to be brimming with optimism and confidence.
The crew behind the Community Schools Initiative, led by Henderson City Councilman Dan Stewart, fits that bill.
The petition, which Stewart and his associates started circulating this month, would amend Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 386 to give incorporated cities, with local voter approval, the ability to break away from their county school district and create their own.
He doesn’t want to pin blame on any person for CCSD’s struggles. The district is just too big, he said.
CCSD has roughly 305,000 students in more than 350 schools over 476 square miles. It’s the fifth-largest school district by enrollment in the United States, despite the Las Vegas area being only the 31st-largest metro in the country, per U.S. Census rankings.
“It just is unmanageable, nonfunctional,” Stewart said. “I don’t think you could throw enough money at it to fix it at this point.”
Initiative co-chair Annalise Caster, a mom of five and a longtime deconsolidation proponent, said it’s not about personalities on the CCSD School Board or in top administration, or teachers unions, or how state lawmakers direct school policy or funding. The district, she maintains, is just too big.
“While there are other school districts that are big that have been able to perform well, that does not work for our community,” Caster said. “We have proven it over and over again, with every new leadership, with every new funding formula.”
That includes state lawmakers in 2017 passing Assembly Bill 469, which gave principals more control to make decisions on the needs of their students. The bill dictates the schools, not the district, have control over their individual budgets.
But the reorganization law transferring certain authority from the central office to local schools hasn’t been instituted by CCSD, and Nevada State Board of Education is considering what actions to take.
In 1956, the Legislature consolidated the roughly 200, mostly tiny, school districts scattered across the state to one district for each of Nevada’s 17 counties. In Clark County alone, that meant collapsing 18 districts.
At the time, Clark County had a population of about 100,000. It is now home to about 2.3 million.
Stewart characterizes his initiative as “enabling legislation” with fundamental differences from prior deconsolidation efforts. Past attempts would have established new boundaries from the outset. The latest proposal would put withdrawal in the hands of city councils, which would pass a resolution or ordinance bringing the matter to the local voters to form their “community” district.
In other words, rather than defining new school districts from the get-go, this simply would communities — say, incorporated cities, using their existing boundaries — to opt out of their countywide school district, if, when and how they choose.
It’s a mechanism that can be used statewide, and one that Stewart characterized as “nonthreatening.”
Former CCSD administrator Eva White helped draft the Community Schools Initiative. People have become frustrated by the previous breakup attempts, she said, and may respond well to this new tack.
“Before, people felt forced for a whole district breakup,” she said. “For some people that was so overwhelming for people to register.”
Kenneth Retzl, director of education policy for the Guinn Center, a Nevada policy think tank, has questions on the latest iteration of breakups.
“I think I know where people are coming from in wanting to break up the district,” he said. But he wants to know “the specific problem.” Is it to improve student achievement? Be responsive to localized needs?
“There are problems and I am sympathetic to all the issues,” said Retzl, a former director of research, accountability and data services for CCSD. “I’m definitely sympathetic to the issues that are confronting CCSD, but let’s identify the problems and find ways to solve those problems – evidence-based solutions to solve those problems.”
He also wants to know about funding, and the cost of duplication of efforts, and equity. Equity needs to be “front and center,” he said.
In other parts of the country, breakaways deepen segregation.
Education funding advocates EdBuild studied school district “secession” laws and breakaway movements across the country and found that 128 communities nationwide attempted to secede between 2000 and 2019, especially since 2017. Of those 128 cases, 73 were successful.
A 2019 study published in AERA Open, a journal from the American Educational Research Association, found that school district secession in the South has 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.
But the breakaway districts were also in areas where local property taxes play a more direct, influential funding role. Clark County breakup proponents stress how they say this would be different.
White, an elementary school principal then central office administrator who retired as CCSD’s interim chief financial officer, helps summarize Nevada’s funding like this:
Property taxes, along with uniquely Nevada revenue streams like bed taxes and gaming revenue, go into a central state pot, then are redistributed to schools.
There is also the pupil-centered weighting, where school districts receive additional state money for children with certain needs, like special education or English language learner status. That layer follows the students, no matter their school district.
And that, she said, significantly addresses equity concerns.
White said breaking away could bring “transformational changes” to local education.
“If this works, nobody has to put a square peg in a round hole,” she said.
Caster said equity was baked in when using city boundaries. She said all of the cities are socioeconomically mixed, and potential new boundaries would follow these established city borders.
Stewart said this initiative can’t say how breakaway districts would split up buildings, attendance boundaries or busing services with CCSD, but the focus is process. If a city decides to withdraw it can tackle those heavy questions then, he said.
Stewart filed the Community Schools Initiative with the Nevada secretary of state in January. Nobody filed a legal challenge to the initiative, he noted.
The group now needs 145,000 valid voter signatures from around the state by November to get the item before the Nevada Legislature in January. Lawmakers will have 45 days to act upon it, and if they don’t, it automatically goes to the 2024 general election ballot. Knowing that implementation would take a few years, Stewart wants the state lawmakers to act on it, not send it to voters.
Stewart acknowledges that historically, breakups have been rooted in Henderson, but he stresses that he is acting as an individual and this is not a “Henderson issue.”
When Stewart, a fourth-generation Nevadan, was a CCSD student in the 1960s and early 70s, the consolidated model worked, he said. Las Vegas was still relatively small.
After he graduated from Western High School in 1971, he attended college at Brigham Young and Stanford universities, then returned to Nevada to raise his children in the Green Valley area of Henderson.
His kids went to Green Valley High School, and now his grandchildren are in CCSD schools — the Stewarts believe in public schools, but now, “it just isn’t functioning. I don’t know how to say it. It’s broken beyond repair, in my opinion.”
Caster has a similar background. Also a fourth-generation Nevadan and CCSD product, Caster has five children, ages 4 to 14. Most are in CCSD schools, even though she has been active in deconsolidation work for 10 years. She was also active with the district reorganization.
“As we have grown, our structure, instead of growing with the city, has not proven to be able to adapt to the changing communities,” she said. “They have implemented a one-size-fits-all rule, and one size does not fit all when your district goes from Mesquite to Laughlin and is so diverse in its needs and requirements.”
Bill Hanlon, a retired CCSD teacher and administrator who now works as an education consultant, said he would back any breakup plan.
Multiple districts would create competition for the best educators, he said — a win-win. And educators could further their careers while staying in town. Currently, CCSD teachers and other staff who don’t want to leave the valley only have choices in the area’s limited (though growing) charter and private school scenes.
The financial cost of multiple districts would be worth it, said Hanlon, who taught math at Eldorado High School for almost 20 years.
“Whatever the costs are to break it up, those costs are minimal compared to what we’re costing students in terms of getting their education right now,” he said.
Caster cited the “48th in the nation” label that people often associate with Nevada’s public schools as a reason why now is the time to try again.
She called on a dubious ranking that U.S. News assigned to Nevada in its state education rankings in 2021. While it’s a state rating, CCSD accounts for 7 out of every 10 schoolchildren in Nevada – so Nevada is synonymous with CCSD.
“It’s insanity not to do something drastic when we are this low,” she said. “We are proof that nothing is working, and when nothing is working you need to change everything.”
Mary Beth Scow, a former member of the CCSD School Board and the Clark County Commission, said she recently came to back deconsolidation. Consolidation allowed economies of scale, she said.
“I’ve changed my tune,” she said.
All nine of her children graduated from CCSD schools, and 28 of her 39 grandchildren have graduated from, are enrolled in, or will attend local schools too.
The pandemic spurred her conversion to seeing smaller districts as having more accountability, access to leaders and a tighter-knit feeling of community.
“I think a lot of the issues that we’re facing now in education, I feel like breaking up may be the only way to solve a lot of this” she said.
Caster said she’s advocating for all children, and that empowering communities is equity.
“This will be complicated,” she said. “But it will be so worth it. It’s an exercise that will definitely bring about results.”
