Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Where I Stand:

Making the powerless powerful

Silver Mesa Recreation Center

Wade Vandervort

The Silver Mesa Recreation Center in North Las Vegas, shown Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2020, will host a program that offers students live classroom instruction.

Editor’s note: As he does every August, Brian Greenspun is turning over his Where I Stand column to others. Today’s guest is North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee.

In North Las Vegas, we spend one hour a day worrying about our problems, and 23 hours a day finding solutions.

That’s how we saved the city from bankruptcy during the Great Recession, raised a junk-bond credit rating into A-plus gold standard status in just five years, and transformed North Las Vegas into an economic driver for Southern Nevada.

Our approach to problem solving has been simple: When there is a problem or issue within our corporate boundaries we consider it our problem — and we work to fix it.

Now, we are applying the same formula to education.

On Monday, in partnership with Clark County, the city of North Las Vegas launched the Southern Nevada Urban Micro Academy, which is providing badly needed education options and support in our city. Children who otherwise likely would be given a jar of peanut butter and told not to answer the door while their parents work and CCSD remains virtual instead are attending in-person homeschool co-op learning sessions, receiving live tutoring and participating in enriching, fun activities in a safe, socially distant environment at a cost of just $2 per day.

This in-person learning will support proven online home-school curricula that allow children to progress at their own pace while still meeting — and in many cases exceeding — Nevada Academic Content Standards.

The challenges the Clark County School District faces in light of COVID-19 are inordinate, and the superintendent and school board’s jobs are certainly unenviable. But so are the painful decisions parents are being forced to make.

The Washington Post reported that one of four women who became unemployed during the pandemic said it was because of a lack of child care — twice the rate among men.

“For low-income and single moms, the pandemic has exacerbated the hard choices between spending a significant portion of their income on child care; finding a cheaper but potentially lower-quality option; or leaving the workforce to become a full-time caregiver. Our survey of working parents found that the loss of hours because of a lack of child care is greater for women of color, women without a college degree and women living in low-income households,” the newspaper reported.

Standing by with no alternative method of education for children whose parents need to work — not only to provide for their families but to sustain our sputtering economy — is unacceptable and not an option. We will not play a role in furthering the disparities that persist in our state.

For far too long, North Las Vegas students have fallen victim to systemic inequalities that have resulted in their being taught in the most inadequate buildings by the newest teachers in the fewest magnet programs. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, those gaps have grown wider by the day creating an injustice to Nevada’s largest minority-majority population and a death knell to economic development for our region and state.

The link between education and economic development is inextricable, and companies have not been shy about expressing their concerns with our schools. Businesses regularly cite Southern Nevada’s failing education system and lack of workforce as a major factor in their decision to locate elsewhere. A generation of children with their education on pause, coupled with a shrinking workforce of parents forced to quit their jobs to teach their kids, certainly won’t reverse that trend. Instead, Southern Nevada Urban Micro Academy is providing high-quality, student-centered, city and county supported in-person learning to make the historically powerless powerful.

Southern Nevada Urban Micro Academy is a unique investment in our people — Southern Nevada’s children and workers. If we aren’t willing to commit to that, why would a Fortune 500 company?

This first-of-its-kind investment will move microschools out of living rooms into recreation centers and libraries to serve more of the children and families who need it most.

As is the North Las Vegas way, we’ve applied good governance principles — responsiveness, accountability, equity and inclusiveness, effectiveness and efficiency — to solve the challenges at hand.

As we battle COVID-19, our hearts break for those who are suffering, but 23 hours a day, we choose to focus on solutions — innovations like Southern Nevada Urban Micro Academy, so that even through this darkness, opportunities remain, for some of our communities most vulnerable and often overlooked.