School K-8 idea has its critics

By Emily Richmond

Thursday, Oct. 9, 2003 | 9:19 a.m.

A proposal to open a school that would serve kindergarten through eighth grade students was met largely with resistance by Henderson parents Wednesday, although Clark County School District officials tried to convince them of its benefits.

More than 60 people turned out at Gordon McCaw Elementary School for the second of two community meetings to discuss the plan, following the first event Tuesday at Burkholder Middle School.

McCaw and Burkholder are on the district's short list for campuses scheduled for rebuilding, which is one of the reasons the area was chosen for the plan, district officials said.

The Henderson area served by the schools, bounded by U.S. 95 and Boulder Highway, is stable in terms of growth, making it ideal for a K-8 school, said Edward Goldman, superintendent of the southeast region. The proposal was first broached for the Anthem area but had to be scrapped because of the demographic changes, Goldman said.

In theory students would be able to attend one campus for nine years, making it more likely that their families would know the staff and be active in the school community, Goldman said.

There's also improved continuity for families, with children at various grade levels starting and finishing class at the same time, Goldman said. Studies have shown test scores improve and the need for discipline declines at K-8 schools, Goldman said.

But parents questioned having young children at school with adolescents, particularly when it came to bus rides and recess.

"Seventh and eighth graders are teenagers, and they go through different stages than little kids," said Victoria Werner, who has a kindergartener and second grader at McCaw. "The little ones look up to the older ones and copy what they do. I don't want my 8-year-old learning about some of the things at his age."

Kindergarten through eighth grade was the norm for the local school district until the late 1950s when it converted to the junior system, to which many new students coming from California were accustomed.

The district's elementary schools now are built to hold 750 students on a nine-month calendar and middle school capacity is 1,750. The K-8 model would be built for 1,200 students -- 400 hundred in grades 6 through 8 and the rest from kindergarten through fifth grade.

While the older students would enjoy smaller classes, the younger students would have access to facilities not available at the district's traditional elementary schools, including laboratories, cafeterias, auditoriums and music rooms, Goldman said.

Anna Camargo, who has as second grader and kindergartener at McCaw along with a seventh grader at Burkholder, urged the other parents at the meeting to reconsider their opposition to the K-8 model.

"This is a good idea because it means familiarity," Camargo told the audience. "I know the teachers here, I know the principal, I know the staff. The parents know each other. I don't want my kids going from here where they're known to Burkholder where they're just a number."

Ron Averett, who has five children at area schools including one at Burkholder, said he would have liked the district's presentation to have been more balanced.

"If this meeting was really to inform the parents, you would have said here's what we found out that was good, and here's what we found out that was bad," Averett told Goldman. "Instead we're hearing it's all rosy and wonderful and we all know that can't really be the case anywhere."

Other parents said they were worried that the district had already decided to move ahead with the proposal regardless of community response. But Clark County School Board member Mary Beth Scow, whose district includes McCaw and Burkholder, said she was keeping an open mind.

"As a board we wouldn't feel comfortable giving final approval unless we knew the majority of the community was in favor of a K-8 school," Scow said at the meeting.

While most of the country's school districts are still configured for elementary schools coupled with middle or junior high schools, the K-8 model has been gaining momentum according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Philadelphia' school system has launched a five-year plan to convert many of its middle schools to K-8. Cleveland began reconfiguring its middle schools to K-8 in 1999 and has since seen test scores and attendance soar, according to a report last year by the American Association of School Administrators.

There are also successful private and parochial schools around the country and in Southern Nevada that use the K-8 configuration.

Those are some of the reasons why Goldman thinks the K-8 might eventually earn support. It's not unusual for parents to oppose what seems like significant changes to the standard school model, he said.

"The exact same thing happened when we opened Walker," Goldman said, referring to the international elementary school in Mission Hills where all kindergarten and first grade students spend half the day learning in Spanish. "Now we have a waiting list around the corner and then some. We wouldn't be proposing this if we didn't honestly believe it was a good thing for our students."

The meeting left parent Joe Leming undecided about the wisdom of the K-8 model, but he was convinced about one thing -- Henderson needs its own school district.

"The Clark County School District is way too big, and this is just another example of them forcing their philosophy on us," said Leming, whose daughter is a first grader at McCaw. "They're out of touch. They should be listening to what the parents want, not telling us what they're going to do regardless."