CCSD Superintendent Jesus F. Jara attends a joint meeting of the Clark County Board of Commissioners and the Clark County School District Board of Trustees at the Clark County Government Center on Thursday, July 18, 2019.
Sunday, July 28, 2019 | 2 a.m.
“Ecstatic.”
That’s how Eldorado High School Principal Dave Wilson felt Wednesday after hearing that he wouldn’t have to eliminate his school’s two dean positions. Instead, he will need to cut $98 per pupil, or approximately $197,608, from his 2019-20 budget — which is about $19,000 less than the cost of his deans.
Clark County School District Superintendent Jesus Jara had initially proposed cutting all dean positions to make up for a projected $17 million budget shortfall for the school year. Eliminating deans would have had a negative impact on school safety, student discipline and other issues overseen by those administrators, said Wilson and other critics of the proposal.
But Wednesday, the superintendent backed away from his initial cost-cutting proposal and announced that middle and high schools would instead need to cut about $98 per pupil to make up for this year’s budget deficit. As long as cuts don’t affect class sizes or teacher positions, what schools cut is up to them.
“The resounding message from all stakeholders, including teachers, support professionals, our principals and our community was that the decision was best left to our principals along with our school organizational teams,” Jara said.
Eldorado will be minimally affected by those cuts because of its projected $200,000 in attrition money for the coming school year, Wilson said. Assuming those dollars, which are left over from last year’s unfilled or underfilled positions, come in as expected, no cuts at the school will be necessary.
“I didn’t have to cut teachers. I didn’t have to cut support staff or programming. I’m not worried about supplies, because those attrition dollars make up for my budget (cuts),” he said.
The district’s proposed cuts, which apply to the area’s roughly 100 middle and high schools, are based on projected enrollment for the upcoming school year, which starts in two weeks. District officials described this solution as more equitable than cutting deans, but some schools will be harder hit than others.
Middle schools in particular will be more adversely affected, Bonanza High Principal Joe Petrie said.
“With high schools, we generally have enough (in our) budgets where we can cover this stuff, whereas middle schools are going to get hit harder because their budgets aren’t as big,” Petrie said.
The principal of one middle school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he will be forced to cut his dean position anyway under the new budget rules because of the restrictions on what principals can cut. As far as he knows, he isn’t the only one in that position.
Despite claims from the district that the cuts would be removed from the classroom, the loss of one of his four administrative roles will have an adverse impact on students, he said.
“It’s maybe our eighth or ninth year in a row of having some kind of cut to our school budgets, which is making it harder and harder to provide services to students, which drives up class sizes,” the principal said. “In general, it’s quite frustrating.”
Like Eldorado, Bonanza has enough projected funding from attrition money and unspent “carryover” money from last year’s budget to cover its $199,863 cut. The school will need to delay campus improvements on which it was hoping to spend that money, but Petrie said students, teachers and parents would hardly notice that and other small cuts to supplies and programs.
“This is a better situation for me than it was before,” Petrie said, referring to the initial plan to eliminate deans.
Throughout the district, most schools will be “saving” money from the newly announced budget cuts compared with the monetary losses they would’ve experienced from cutting their deans, district documents show. But even some principals at the schools losing more money now are relieved that they will be able to reinstate their dean positions.
Sierra Vista High, for example, will lose $261,713 this year — $42,444 more than the cost of its two deans. Principal John Anzalone is nonetheless satisfied.
“We had that money set aside just in case of budget cuts anyway, so we shouldn’t feel a huge impact at Sierra Vista,” Anzalone said. “I think some of the schools that will feel it a little more will be smaller schools or schools that won’t have supplemental funding.”
Indian Springs High, one of the smallest schools in the district, located about an hour from Las Vegas, will lose $7,841 from the new cuts. Under the plan to cut dean positions, the school would have been unaffected because it lacks deans.
Brian Wiseman, principal of the high school, middle school and elementary school in Indian Springs, said his middle and high schools will need to cut supplies to balance their budgets, but that they will “be OK.” He supports the superintendent’s new decision given that it will help other schools maintain dean positions and keep their schools safe.
“The principals I’ve talked to, and I haven’t talked to all of them, but I think most of us are in agreement that we can all chip in a little bit to help take the burden off this and not sacrifice the safety of the students at the schools,” Wiseman said.
Although Spring Valley High principal Tam Larnerd is relieved that he won’t have to cut his two deans, he feels there remain unanswered questions as to how the district determined the per-pupil dollar amount and why elementary schools are exempt.
Spring Valley will lose about $262,595, or about $43,326 more than the cost of its deans. To balance its budget, the school will cut a student success coordinator position it had hoped to add and will rely on carryover money from last year, Larnerd said.
“We’ll just have to wait to make any major purchases until probably September or October, when that money is returned to our schools,” he said.
Adding to Larnerd’s frustration, his school was hit by another cut in January, losing over $300,000 in funding when the district changed its Title I allocations to only the neediest schools. While he is relieved to keep his deans, whom he said work proactively to keep his school safe, he still wishes lawmakers in Carson City had found a way to better fund Clark County schools this legislative session — and that deans hadn’t been caught in the middle of funding woes.
“We’re down here horrifically impacting these people’s lives for the entire summer over $17 million,” Larnerd said. “What a travesty.”
