Some struggling schools skeptical of plan for Achievement School District

By Ian Whitaker

Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016 | 2 a.m.

The stage is set for Nevada’s new Achievement School District to convert a handful of public schools into privately run charters, but a crucial question remains: Will those schools and communities be on board?

Of the hundreds who piled into Von Tobel Middle School’s auditorium on a recent Wednesday night, some held signs and cheered as principal Jaime Ditto decried the school’s inclusion on a shortlist for possible state intervention.

The Las Vegas school is among 21 in Clark County eligible to be converted by the start of the next school year.

Charter schools are publicly funded but operated mainly by private management organizations. Despite largely mixed results when it comes to performance — charter schools in Nevada were found to have the slowest academic growth in a 2013 study — they nonetheless are the first choice for many families. While those parents choose to put their kids in charter schools, it's a different story under the ASD. If Von Tobel is converted, families who don't like the outcome would have to consider a public school farther away from their neighborhood.

“It feels like it’s happening to us with no communication at all,” said Ditto, who described potential ASD conversion as a “takeover.”

Many families in the crowd looked on in silence. For some, it was the first they’d ever heard of the Achievement School District, a key part of the education reforms passed by Republicans in the Legislature last year in return for supporting Gov. Brian Sandoval’s tax package. The assumption is that the underperforming public schools will be more likely to improve under the purview of a charter organization. If they do, the schools could then be put back under the purview of the Clark County School District, or could remain charters.

Modeled on a similarly named program in Tennessee, the ASD will choose six underperforming public schools early next year to transform into charter schools. They'll come from a list of nearly 50 struggling schools.

Von Tobel staffers say that while the school faces challenges academically, it’s on an upward trajectory. It's a three-star school where reading and math scores have been slowly inching upward, and it happens to boast the largest mariachi club of any CCSD middle school.

“We’ve been here long enough to know what we can improve upon,” said Xavier Gastellum, a teacher and mariachi coach in his 11th year at the school. “Charter schools should not be forced on anybody.”

Like a majority of the CCSD schools on the ASD list, Von Tobel is in a heavily Hispanic and Latino neighborhood. Many of the students are still learning English.

It hasn’t been the only one to balk at the idea of a takeover. In mid-October, hundreds of students and parents turned out to express their frustration at West Prep Academy.

The state Department of Education claims the schools are “persistently failing,” but locals are quick to point out that they also are in areas where the main challenges are extracurricular, like poverty, language barriers and hectic home lives. A report on Tennessee's ASD found that public schools converted into charters were largely limited by those same challenges.

Critics also point out that the ASD’s list was largely drafted from test scores and other data. When ASD Superintendent Jana Wilcox-Lavin showed up at Von Tobel to answer questions from parents, it was her first time visiting the campus.

Wilcox-Lavin and ASD Deputy Director Rebecca Feiden are the ASD's only staff in Nevada. With such a small team in charge of such a major program, it becomes even more crucial that communities are kept in the loop.

“This creates a lot of uncertainty,” Feiden said. “We have to be thoughtful.”

Wilcox-Lavin herself was the chief executive of Memphis Scholars, a Tennessee charter-school organization that managed some schools under that state’s ASD program.

“Change is hard for everyone,” she said. "But if we look at the ASD as an opportunity to explore different school models … we have the opportunity to see what they can do in a constraint-free environment.”

Their current task is whittling down the list of underperforming schools by 20 percent. When that happens on Nov. 15, it’s safe to say that families across the valley will be anxiously checking to see if their school is still on it.