Clark County’s cities, with eye toward demand, expand early education options

An innovative program that brings preschool classrooms within modified buses into Las Vegas neighborhoods has a waiting list.

And in Henderson, the city just approved a multimillion-dollar investment to build a dedicated campus that would roughly double the capacity of its preschool program.

It is part of a trend in Southern Nevada: City-owned preschools are growing to meet the demand.

Public education for children between ages 3 and 5 who are ripe for learning but too young for kindergarten isn’t new as a municipal initiative — all five of Clark County’s cities run established preschool programs of some kind, separate from private and Clark County School District prekindergartens.

But more of the littlest pupils are filling city preschool seats as Nevada endeavors to offer prekindergarten more widely.

Angela Rose, a manager in the Department of Youth Development and Social Initiatives for the city of Las Vegas, said she was expecting a bill for universal public preschool to be considered in the next session of the Nevada Legislature. She says there is always going to be a need for preschool, and universal preschool would in Nevada create a seat for every eligible 4-year-old in the state.

“Most of when their brain develops happens before kinder, and kinder looks a lot different than when we were in kinder,” she said.

According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 67% of Nevada’s 3- and 4-year-olds are not in school; nationally, the figure is 54%.

Tara Phebus, Education Initiatives division head for the city of Henderson, said it was easy to see that there aren’t enough seats for all the kids who could attend a high-quality program.

In Henderson, 60% of 3- and 4-year-olds aren’t in any preschool, the city said.

On Tuesday, the Henderson City Council unanimously gave the go-ahead for the city to build an early childhood education center in the Cadence neighborhood, near Grand Cadence and Galleria Drive. The $15.3 million project is expected to open in 2027.

“The idea of a city investing in the infrastructure for a preschool isn’t necessarily unique and different, but I think definitely fits in with our strategic priorities of focusing on quality education, and then being able to identify those communities that could benefit from additional infrastructure, and then working together to be able to figure out how we can fit it in with that community and with the existing offerings that we have,” Phebus said.

The funding comes from city redevelopment fees, a portion of which are set aside for education-related projects. Henderson has been saving for years to build the campus, Phebus said.

Council documents show that the city envisions a center with seven to nine classrooms to serve a total of about 180 children over 12,000 to 15,000 square feet of space, plus playgrounds, offices and more.

Henderson’s sole current preschool takes up half the building at Valley View Recreation Center near downtown. There’s room for up to about 160 children there.

Parents can select half-day or full-day instruction two or three days per week for their 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds. An all-day, all-week option is also available for 4- and 5-year-olds.

Phebus said Valley View has housed the preschool for about 30 years, starting with a couple of classrooms. It now has eight.

Over the last five years, the city has improved the building and made it more suitable and secure for young children. It has also followed best practices as they developed to make preschool more formalized with a structured curriculum and alignment with statewide assessments. (Henderson’s preschool is tuition-based, but scholarships and subsidies may be available.)

Rose said that cities have diverse physical infrastructure that allows them to stand up preschools — land, community centers and other buildings that can be renovated.

Las Vegas has a robust, free educational program under its Strong Start brand — four modified buses in its Strong Start GO! mobile school program, which brings school on wheels to low-income neighborhoods for half-day programming, and five brick-and-mortar Strong Start Academy locations that offer full-day classes. (It also has an elementary school in downtown Las Vegas.)

Between the two formats, 380 children are currently enrolled, Rose said.

Of those, 120 are in the mobile program. This is the first time it has been full since launching in 2022, Rose said.

One of the Strong Start Academies, within the Lorenzi Park complex a few miles west of downtown, started out as the original location of the Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas.

The museum is now on the other side of the freeway at the Springs Preserve, and the city added many more walls and bathrooms inside the original building to create a school. Eight classrooms are open now, with a ninth coming soon.

This past week, one of the classrooms had 4-year-olds experimenting with mixing finger paints. Another had 3-year-olds drawing, buzzing around a play kitchen and shaping clay.

These joyfully kinetic spaces promote social-emotional development and give children a glimpse of the academic rigors of modern kindergarten. Lorenzi center co-director Trisha Lockwood said today’s kindergarteners are lost without preschool.

Most of the area’s public preschool seats are in CCSD. According to district enrollment data, preschool enrollment hit about 12,500 by the end of the last school year. The Superintendent’s Student Equity and Access Commission under former Superintendent Jesus Jara called preschool participation a “failure point” and identified it as one of four key metrics to improve, which it did to mixed success between 2020 and 2023, according to annual reports.

Prekindergarten expanded to more elementary school sites, but the overall percentage of available seats that ended up filled fluctuated. Uniquely, CCSD reserves nearly half of its preschool seats for students in special education.

According to the National Institute for Early Education Research, preschool improves school readiness and math and reading proficiency, and reduces the likelihood of students being held back.

Whether young children sit in classrooms run by the city or the school district, their gains are shared successes, said Andrea Moore, the director of education for Acelero Learning of Clark County. Acelero contracts with Las Vegas to operate its brick-and-mortar preschools.

If cities left all the work of developing children to CCSD, “that feels irresponsible as a municipality,” she said.

Phebus said Henderson and district officials met just a couple of weeks ago to talk about referring families who find their zoned schools’ preschool programs full to the city option.

“The general consensus from residents here is that education is important, and I think increasingly folks are looking for those early childhood opportunities as everybody learns more about the impacts of high-quality early learning for later outcomes,” she said.

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