School district succeeds where rural charter failed

Monday, April 28, 2008 | 2 a.m.

At Keystone Academy, a tiny charter high school in rural Sandy Valley, the close calls had become routine. Nearly every year since its 1999 debut, the program had been threatened with closure for failing to meet one state requirement or another.

But in April 2007, the Clark County School District’s decision was final. Keystone would cease to exist at the end of the academic year.

Students and their families initially were distressed. Would Sandy Valley teens have to get on a bus at 4:45 a.m. for a two-hour ride to Liberty High School? Would they have to move into “town” and bunk with relatives? Should they opt for home schooling?

Parents feared some students in the town northwest of Jean would simply drop out in the face of such frustrations — the exact outcome Keystone’s organizers had sought to prevent.

So, about this time last year, Mark Jones, principal of the new high school program created by the Clark County School District to replace Keystone, headed over to the charter school to address the entire student body — all 40 of them.

Here’s what you’ll get from us, Jones told them: brand-new portable classrooms, textbooks fresh from the publisher and dedicated teachers, many with decades of experience.

“We’re going to give you the very best. And in return, that’s what we’re expecting to get from you,” Jones told them.

A year later, at the new Sandy Valley High School on the existing elementary and middle school site, it appears both the district and the students are keeping up their ends of the bargain.

Average daily attendance hovers at 93 percent to 95 percent, up from 89 percent at the charter school. Discipline issues are minimal. And the girls softball team is off to a promising start.

“We haven’t won a game yet, but we got within one run the last time,” said Chyanna Dresden, the team’s catcher and a junior at the new Sandy Valley High School. “Some of the girls haven’t played softball before. We’re actually getting pretty good.”

The high school’s total enrollment is 60, including the 40 students from Keystone. Of seven graduating seniors, three have definite plans to attend UNLV or CSN, and two others are on the brink of deciding.

The Sandy Valley elementary and middle school programs have about 200 students in preschool through eighth grade. The district built a new elementary facility in 2002, followed by the middle school in 2006. Jones is principal of all three.

Parents had some concerns about older students’ sharing space with the younger ones, but the staggered bell schedule prevents overlap, Jones said. He would prefer to let the high school students start their days later than 7:30 a.m., but the district can’t spare the extra school bus that would be necessary.

One of the founders of Keystone, Dawn Haviland, said she’s pleased by what she has seen so far at the new high school. It will likely take several more years for programs to become firmly established, but “they’ve given our community a heart and a pulse,” Haviland said.

The problem for students “wasn’t just the long bus ride; it was the cultural difference,” said Haviland, justice of the peace for the Goodsprings Township Justice Court. “If you see somebody on a horse ride by your house every day and you wave because you know them, that’s a different world.”

Frankie Carlson, a Sandy Valley senior who spent three years at Keystone, agrees. If the district hadn’t stepped in to fill the gap left by Keystone’s closure, Carlson planned to move in with her grandmother and attend Las Vegas High School.

She dreaded the prospect.

“I have a lot of friends here,” Carlson said. “We like to ride our bikes in the desert. In Vegas you can’t ride your bike around — there’s nowhere to go.”

She also would have lost out on the small classes she had gotten used to at Keystone, which continue at the new high school. The math classes have as few as eight students per teacher, a far cry from the 35 to 40 students common at many of the district’s larger campuses. So in Sandy Valley, the students are more likely to get more individual attention from their teachers.

But although Sandy Valley may offer impressive teacher-student ratios, it can’t compete with the range of course offerings at the district’s comprehensive high schools. For 2008-09, Jones hopes to offer his students the chance to enroll in classes at Spring Valley High School, participating by video conferencing. He has also asked the district to expand the new school’s bandwidth capabilities, so teachers can begin using more sophisticated classroom technology.

While awaiting those kinds of upgrades, Sandy Valley residents have rallied around the new school. The athletic teams have loyal followings. A community barbecue in the fall drew hundreds of parents, with Jones handling the grill duty.

“Our goal from the very beginning, the whole intent of Keystone, was the recognition that local education is very, very important,” Haviland said. “Even though we are a rural community, our children are just as valuable and deserve the same opportunities.”