Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Lawmakers study reviving empowerment schools in Clark County

A mothballed program that showed promising results in Las Vegas schools by putting more power in the hands of teachers and principals could be resurrected.

State lawmakers tasked with studying ways to reorganize the Clark County School District voted unanimously today to hire Michael Strembitsky, the father of empowerment schools, to study how the model could be expanded to every neighborhood school in the district.

The $150,000 contract, if approved by a legislative finance committee Thursday, will give lawmakers and Strembitsky until about September to come up with a final plan.

In a hearing today, Strembitsky called the plan an “upheaval” to the district’s current way of doing things.

As school superintendent in Edmonton, Canada, in the 1980s, Strembitsky pioneered the empowerment model that quickly spread to school districts around the world. In an empowerment school, principals and teachers are granted more leeway to make decisions usually left up to a school district’s central office.

As the theory goes, local control over things like staffing levels, budgets and schedules makes schools more responsive to the needs of students and parents, which boosts achievement.

The program was started in 2007 at four elementary schools in Las Vegas and expanded to about 30 schools by 2010. Empowerment schools received hundreds of dollars in extra spending per student and added instructional time.

A UNLV study in 2010 found that students in grades 3 through 5 at empowerment schools performed significantly better academically than students in traditional schools. But the model wasn’t a “silver bullet” to increase achievement in every school, the report said.

The program largely fell by the wayside during the recession after the Legislature cut funding for it.

The program was popular with principals and teachers, who said it improved morale and instilled a sense of community at schools that adopted it.

“Our principal trusted us to make good decisions, so we did,” Karen Egger, a librarian at Keller Middle School, said when it became an empowerment school in 2008. “We spent the money like it was coming out of our own pockets.”

If Strembitsky’s model were adopted, CCSD’s central office would transition from making top-down decisions to providing a menu of services for schools that request them.

Many of the district’s current employees would have to be trained on the empowerment model, and questions remain as to whether lawmakers would have to approve funding for a reboot of the program.

“The big part of it is getting central office and principals on board, and I think that’s a daunting task,” said Grant Hanevold, assistant student achievement chief and a former principal. “If you are truly going to run an empowerment school and district, you are going to have to bring that philosophy all the way up to the superintendent.”

Hiring Strembitsky is the first major decision from the state committee tasked by last year’s Legislature with reforming the CCSD management model.

The committee of nine lawmakers have met on and off for months but quickly settled on the idea of returning the decision-making to the school level.

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