Well-prepared students quiz governor’s staff chief

By Emily Richmond

Monday, May 19, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Mike Dayton, the governor’s chief of staff, endured more of grilling than he expected last week at the hands of a group of high school students.

The Clark County School District’s Student Advisory Council has extended several invitations to Gov. Jim Gibbons to appear at one of its meetings. Last week, Dayton agreed to fill in for his boss. He was joined by Nevada Superintendent of Public Instruction Keith Rheault, who also fielded questions from the student panel.

Zhan Okuda-Lim of Valley High School and J.R. Planas of Canyon Springs asked most of the questions on behalf of the council, and the depth and breadth of their preparation was obvious.

“You should be given academic credit for all your homework on this,” Rheault said, as the audience chuckled. “I’ll write you a letter.”

Dayton defended the governor’s cuts to education funding, saying it would be unfair to expect other critical services to shoulder the burden of a massive revenue shortfall. The cuts to areas such as mental health, public safety and corrections would have been catastrophic, Dayton said. When asked whether legislators had been consulted, Dayton insisted they had — at least for the second and third round of the decision-making process.

His explanation left Okuda-Lim and Planas looking less than satisfied. In addition to lawmakers, the governor should have more closely consulted the state’s 17 school districts, Planas told Dayton.

Dayton pointed out that the original budget provided an 18 percent increase in K-12 funding. So, Dayton reasoned, even with 4.5 percent shaved off, districts still came out ahead.

But isn’t it true, Okuda-Lim countered, that the majority of the remaining increase was to cover growth in student enrollment, and salary increases for teachers? And that none of the money would go directly to students?

Before Dayton could respond, Rheault said, “You hit it right on the head with that question.”

What’s been cut, Rheault told the students, is the planned expansion of full-day kindergarten classes, the “empowerment schools” pilot program, extra money for career and technical education and grants to individual schools.

“The 18 percent everyone’s mentioning, we didn’t see a dollar more for operating these schools or supplies,” Rheault said. “It didn’t add any new programs or new courses at the school level. The funding (that was cut) would have done a lot of good things, things that people wanted.”

Planas told Dayton: “We do understand that Nevada does not have the revenue we were expecting, and we probably can’t spend as much as we have in the past year. But we expect education to remain the top priority of our state.”

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School District officials were unable to track down nearly three-quarters of the 3,791 high school students they initially believed had not returned to the Clark County School District after last summer’s break.

Retired guidance counselors tracked down some of the missing students, but they were stymied right off the bat because they had no valid emergency contact numbers for 2,771 of them. Time after time, the counselors dialed disconnected numbers or reached weekly motels that no longer had a record of the student’s family.

Ultimately, 1,020 students were located and the district was able to take 629 of the names off the dropout list because it turned out that 285 of them had graduated, 74 were still enrolled in a district school, 111 were in the adult education program, 44 were enrolled in schools in other states and four were foreign exchange students who had returned home.

Additionally, the counselors managed to persuade at least a few kids to reconsider their decisions to quit. Some of the interview sessions lasted more than 30 minutes, said Karlene McCormick-Lee, the deputy superintendent overseeing the dropout survey.

In one instance, a dropout passed the counselor’s name and number on to a friend, who called and asked for help getting back into school.

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After more than 80 percent of high schoolers and middle schoolers failed a new end-of-semester math test in January, the district vowed to better prepare kids the next time around. With final exams looming, Bill Hanlon, the administrator who helped write the new test, wants parents and students to know help is also available online. Practice tests, as well as detailed outlines of the concepts covered in each class, can be found at the Regional Professional Development Program’s Web site. Go to http:rpdp.net and click on the links in the top right corner of the home page.