Class-size reduction getting fed help

The U.S. government is paying for 90 new Clark County teachers this year to further reduce class sizes.

Officials expect $5.6 million in federal grant money to reach the Nevada Department of Education this week. The money will be sent immediately to the state's 17 county school districts.

About $3.9 million is bound for Clark County, to be used for 90 new teachers in the upcoming school year, which starts Aug. 23.

About 12 of those teachers are finishing up their education degrees, and some of the federal money will be used to pay for part of their schooling.

The federal money is coming to Nevada as part of an initiative by President Clinton to inject 100,000 teachers into the nation's schools to lower class sizes around the country.

Clinton eventually wants to spend $12.4 billion nationwide over seven years to lower class sizes to 18 to 1 in primary grades.

Nevada already has a class-size reduction law that mandates student-to-teacher ratios of 16 to 1 in first and second grades and 19 to 1 in third grade.

"We're ahead of the game because we already have state class-size reduction," Skip Wenda, director of the Southern Nevada office of the Nevada Department of Education, said.

The problem in fast-growing Clark County is finding enough classrooms to accommodate class-size reduction. To meet 16-to-1 ratios, the district is forced in many cases to put two "team teachers" in one classroom with 32 children.

"After three years, we can finish each other's sentences," said Karen Vassallo, who team teaches in a classroom of 33 second graders with Julie Ruschmeyer. "It's like a marriage."

Still, the two James McMillan Elementary School teachers say they would prefer to work in their own classrooms with 16 students each.

"I feel like we both have 33 to 1," Ruschmeyer said. "With 16 to 1 you just have so much more time on task. It takes so much time to get 30 kids just to sit down. "

Ruschmeyer and Vassallo often divide the students into eight or 10 different small groups and situate them in "centers" around the room where students often work by themselves on different subjects, such as computers, spelling, math and writing.

"We try to stress independence -- that you need to take care of things on your own," Ruschmeyer said.

Pupils routinely jostle each other in the room, they said.

"When everyone walks around, it's really crowded," 8-year-old Justis Kimbrough said. "There's only 33 of us, but it's a small room."

McMillan sits next to Edythe and Lloyd Katz Elementary School in northwest Las Vegas, and the two operate jointly. The schools are "full, but not overcrowded" with 1,800 students, Principal Dode Worsham said. The schools have 19 second grade teachers, 16 of them in team-teaching rooms.

"When you are dealing with this critical age -- that learn-to-read mode -- the smaller the class size, the better you can meet their individual needs," Worsham said. "When children come here for kindergarten, some of them are already reading, some of them don't know one letter of the alphabet."

School officials had already planned to hire 1,500 to 1,600 teachers by this fall to meet the demands of growth. Now district officials will try to hire the additional 90 federally funded teachers.

"Really, our district is growing so rapidly that this will be a drop in the bucket," Barry Hamilton, who handles federal programs for the district, said. "But it's a nice little windfall for us."

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