Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Breaking up is hard to do — Mason says racism a factor in districting

The president of the Clark County School Board said Wednesday that racism is an additional unspoken motive behind the drive to break up the nation's fifth-largest school district.

"I'm sorry to have to say it in this day and age but a lot of this is people not wanting Latinos and African-Americans in their neighborhoods," board President Larry Mason, who is of Hispanic descent, said. "They need to get over it. Our job is to educate all of our kids, not just some of our kids."

Mason's comments thrust a largely unspoken issue -- racism and racial parity -- into a debate that has been fought publicly on other grounds. Advocates of breaking up the district say it will improve the quality of education and make schools more responsive to parents. Race has been a subtext that rarely arose in public discussion.

But injecting race into the debate also could provide an incendiary new argument to those who want the district left intact, giving them a tool that has been used elsewhere as a diversion to close off all debate.

Mason said that those who want to break up the School District resent the time and expense required to educate minority students who now make up the bulk of enrollment.

Since 2001 Clark County has been a "minority majority" district, with white students accounting for less than half of the total. White students currently make up 39 percent of the 292,000 students, down from 41 percent last year. Hispanic enrollment has been steadily increasing and now stands at 37 percent. The black student population has remained relatively stable at just over 14 percent.

Mason also said that critics of the district resent the power the Clark County School District wields as the state's largest employer and recipient of taxpayer dollars.

"The district is one of the most powerful entities in the state of Nevada, and they want to control it," Mason said.

Sen. Sandra Tiffany, R-Henderson, who has advocated breaking up the district for each of the last three legislative sessions, disagreed sharply with Mason's assessment.

"The reason I have worked on the issue of deconsolidation for 14 years is the size of the bureaucracy, the layers and levels that a parent needs to go through to get a problem solved for themselves," Tiffany said.

"We are no longer community-based schools, we stretch from Mesquite to Laughlin to Mount Charleston. The district has done nothing but grow, and the proficiency (of students) has done nothing but decrease."

In 2001 then-Superintendent Carlos Garcia reorganized the School District into five geographic regions, each with a superintendent who reported to the central office. Surveys of students, parents and staff by the district suggest that "consumer satisfaction" has improved in the ensuing four years.

Student achievement has remained relatively stagnant, however, with slight gains in the graduation rate and performance on standardized tests.

Deconsolidation won't solve those concerns, Mason said.

"If you break it up and spread it around you still have the same problems," he said.

But another leading Hispanic offered a different analysis Wednesday about the needs of minority students. Fernando Romero, president of Las Vegas-based Hispanics in Politics, said he is leaning toward supporting the proposed breakup.

"Being the fifth-largest district and not graduating half your minority students means something has to change," Romero said. "As long as the tax base is divided fairly and equitably, I would be in favor of trying something else."

Romero said he did not agree with Mason that the influx of minority students, particularly Hispanics, was motivating supporters of the deconsolidation plan. Tiffany's argument that the community has been cut off from its schools holds water, he said.

"Try calling any administrator to come to the telephone," Romero said. "If you ever get a response or a call back it's enough to make you want to faint from shock."

The underlying issues of race, socio-economic disparities and educational equity have played out in debates over consolidating and breaking up districts across the country, said Kathy Christie, vice president of the Education Commission of the States.

"Any time you have a conversation about how you reconfigure districts, those questions are going to be a consideration," Christie said. "In some cases the idea is that consolidation will lead to more fairness. In others it's that smaller districts might mean more local control and better support for student needs."

The Arkansas Legislature recently voted to require merger of districts with fewer than 350 students. The vote came after that state's Supreme Court ruled the existing funding formulas for schools resulted in unconstitutional inequities between poor communities and their wealthier counterparts.

And in Nebraska last year, the Omaha Public Schools Board approved a resolution to consolidate the city's small districts into one entity. The change would reduce the overall percentage of the city's students who are minorities as well as those classified as English Language Learners. Currently 54 percent of Omaha's students are minorities, compared with less than 20 percent for the smaller surrounding districts, Christie said.

The smaller districts are fighting the consolidation plan both in court and at the state Legislature, Christie said.

The guiding issue shouldn't be the size of the districts but the size of the individual schools, said Paul Peterson, senior fellow at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution think tank and a member of the organization's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.

"The evidence is fairly convincing that smaller schools are more effective," said Peterson, who is also director of education and policy governance at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "At the district level there are some modest benefits of having a larger organization, but those are more than offset by the deficits of larger schools."

Nationally the trend has been for smaller districts -- some with less than 100 students -- to consolidate, while campuses are increasing in size, Peterson said. With elementary schools nearing enrollments of 1,000 and high schools topping 3,100 students, Clark County has some of the nation's largest campuses.

"We've been moving in the wrong direction," Peterson said. "The basic question is whether we'll get closer to smaller schools if we break these districts up."

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest with about 800,000 students, attempted in the late 1990s to give its schools more autonomy and control over budgetary decisions, hiring and curriculum. The district was organized into 27 "clusters," which were supposed to function semiautonomously. The clusters were eventually consolidated into eight regional offices, each headed by a local superintendent.

But an evaluation of the plan several years later showed most of the key decisions were still being made by the district's central office and that the local superintendents had only limited authority.

James Hager, a professor at UNLV's School of Education and former superintendent of the Washoe County School District, said he favors giving more control to the district's regional offices as well as to principals.

Hager, who said he withdrew his name from consideration to be Clark County's next superintendent in November after discussions with his family, pointed out that even small districts are not immune to bureaucracy.

Even attempting deconsolidation may be more trouble than it's worth, Hager said.

"The amount of effort and energies, legally and politically, that would have to go into deciding how we distribute the tax base and how we decide ownership," he said. "Quite frankly I think we would be better to focus on student achievement and improving funding overall."

Emily Richmond can be reached at 259-8829 or at [email protected].

Join the Discussion:

Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Full comments policy