By Vernon Robison

Editor

For nearly two years now, I have had the privilege of serving as a community representative on the Empowerment Committee at Moapa Valley High School. This committee; which is composed of members of school administration, faculty and staff, as well as parents and community members; is tasked with nothing less than the full governance of the school.

The essence of the Empowerment concept is that certain local schools are given added autonomy in decisions on budget, curriculum, staffing, and scheduling. In return, the school’s administration and staff take on a higher level of accountability for positive results.

But it is important to note just how these local decisions are made. The school’s governance decisions are not unilaterally handed at the whim the school’s principal, as some have feared when considering the Empowerment model. Rather they are discussed, considered, analyzed, debated, and finally decided, by this stakeholder group called the Empowerment Committee. The committee meets twice each month and without a consensus among that group, governance decisions in the school cannot be made.

For example, last fall the Empowerment Committee was fully occupied with allocating grant funding. When the Empowerment program at CCSD was gaining steam back in 2008, the Lincy Foundation gave a significant grant to help get the program started. For the local school, this amounted to an infusion of $300,000 a year into the MVHS budget for three years. By last year, much of that funding was going towards maintain existing staffing levels amid significant state budget cuts to education. Still, there was a good deal of money left over to be spent at the discretion of the Empowerment Committee. The grant money couldn’t be saved to roll over into the next year. It had to be spent, or it went away. So the Committee heard requests from various faculty members proposing ways to use portions of the funding on equipment, supplies, technology and other materials long needed in the classroom.

All of these requests were heard and the Committee discussed how to spend the money as a group. The primary focus in making these decisions was on whether, and just how much, the spending would help improve education as a whole at this particular high school. In the end, the decisions made were generally very good for education at the school.

This spring, however, faced with the three year Lincy Foundation grant now coming to an end, the Committee has had an entirely different task in hand. Over the past couple of months, the focus of the group has been on how the school can best weather next year’s budget cuts. CCSD higher-ups have told MVHS Principal Grant Hanevold that the school should be prepared to absorb about 17% in cuts to its budget. With over 90% of the Empowerment school budget being spent on salaries, it was clear that this meant losing people: teachers, administrators, staff.

Of course, this task was much more daunting than the previous one. Now we were talking about specific people’s lives and livelihoods; people that we knew and valued as part of the school and community. But that wasn’t all. We were also talking about cuts to areas of quality education currently taking place at the school. It was the classic question of which is the least worst in a field of bad decisions.

Once again, the problem was faced as a committee. Each member; as parents, educators, administrators, local business owners and respected community leaders; brought a different perspective and experience level to the table. The guiding principle throughout the process was, again, maintaining the quality of education at the school. The focus was always on the kids.

In the end, I don’t think that any one of us was overjoyed with the final outcome. But it was remarkable to see the innovative efforts, inventive ideas and unflagging determination that rose to the top throughout the process.

The Committee’s solution was tailor-made to suit the unique MVHS student body. As residents of the greater Moapa Valley, the Committee members brought an understanding of how this community works and of the important role that the high school plays in it. All of us understood what values are important to the folks here. No one but local residents could, or would, have taken such pains to find this unique set of solutions. And, quite frankly, our results probably couldn’t successfully be applied to any other school in the district.

This final point highlights, once again, the simple beauty of the Empowerment model. Whether it is surplus money to be spent, or painful cuts to be weathered, decisions affecting the classroom are best made at the local level. How would a group of senior administrators sitting in a Las Vegas conference room possibly know how to best cut 17% of the MVHS budget?

Education does not lend itself to one-size-fits-all policies. Every community, every school, every class, every student has different needs and unique methods. Before the CCSD brass starts handing out one-size-fits-all cuts which will deeply affect our kids down here in the classrooms, two things should be done.

First, every ounce of central administrative fat should be trimmed off of the CCSD bone. No inside-the-classroom cuts should even be considered before every last penny of central administrative cost is fully justified.

Second, if additional cuts are still needed after that, budget autonomy ought to be granted to individual schools to consider their own cuts.

Rather than these disingenuous efforts to manipulate parents and community members with bogus, politically motivated “surveys”, the district should make a genuine effort to garner real parent feedback and true hands-on community involvement in education. The Empowerment Committee model is the simple key, already in place, to do just that.

In every school, bring local administrators, faculty and staff together with representatives of parents, local businessmen and community leaders. Then allow this veritable brain trust of local experts to find the solution that will make the most sense to their own school community and to their own childrens’ education.