Community Discusses MVHS Empowerment

The Moapa Valley High School (MVHS) hosted a Community Meeting, on Monday, May 19 in the Ron Dalley Auditorium, to present and discuss initial plans for its new Empowerment School status.

MVHS was selected earlier this month as one of 14 Empowerment Schools in the Clark County School District (CCSD). The school was one of six schools that were selected in this year’s round of picks. All of the other Empowerment Schools in the district are located in urban Las Vegas.

In attendance at Monday’s meeting were officials from the CCSD Superintendent’s Region which oversees the Empowerment Schools.

Hauser explained that Empowerment represented a drastic change in management style. He cited a nationwide trend in many large city school districts towards decentralization of decision-making; bringing management back to the local school administrators.

“Empowerment is really driven by the thought that the most important place in the system is the school,” Hauser said.

Previously, most of the important decisions were made by the regional CCSD officials, Hauser said. The goal was to bring all of the different schools to a point where they were all facing the same direction in their operation. Since the accountability was at the feet of the regional officials, it was difficult for a principal to get approval for an innovative idea that was outside of that unified system.

But, Hauser explained that under Empowerment, innovative methods which meet specific needs are encouraged. “As an Empowerment school proposes something, if it sounds good for the kids, the default answer is ‘yes’,” Hauser said. “If you want to try something different, I say okay lets try it out and see where it goes. We try to make it work. On the other hand, in the traditional regions, the default answer is usually no.”

Under Empowerment, the local principal is given autonomy in several different areas. The principal is given complete control over how discretionary funds in the budget of the school are spent. He is also given additional latitudes in the areas of staff development and training, school day schedule and calendar and in staffing at the school.

Hauser talked about the fact that the current round of Empowerment schools, including MVHS, had been approved without additional funding at this time. Previous Empowerment schools chosen were allotted additional funding to be used at the discretion of the principal to enact the school’s empowerment plan. CCSD officials are still working to secure funding for this year’s selections but budget tightening at the state level have slowed this down.

“In the end, this round of schools might show that the empowerment model could be of value even without funding,” Hauser said. “My hope is that it moves forward even without funding. Funding or not, it is the way that schools should be operated.”

MVHS Principal, Grant Hanevold, presented the values behind what would be the school’s customized empowerment plan. The plan’s main focus was on increasing the percentage of graduates who go on to post-secondary education.

Hanevold cited statistics that indicated that, even though MVHS has the second highest percentage of Honors Diploma graduates in the district, it is #19 in the district in its percentage of students going on to post-secondary school.

To improve this statistic, Hanevold proposed to increase the number of Honors and Advanced Placement courses being offered as well as create more opportunities for students to receive dual credits at the College of Southern Nevada.