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March 28, 2024 8:17 am
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Local Group Weighs M.V. Role In CCSD Reorganization

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

A group of local education advocates are already hard at work in determining just what Moapa Valley’s involvement should be in the upcoming process to reorganize the Clark County School District (CCSD). The group views the impending reorganization, which was approved this year by the State Legislature in Assembly Bill 394, as a long-awaited opportunity to decentralize decision-making on education and bring it closer to home.

The local group was begun by only a handful of people who were curious about the direction of AB 394. Thus far the group includes Lindsey Dalley, Dr. Larry Moses and Scott Carson of Logandale; Charlene Udall and Chad Leavitt of Moapa; and Judy Metz and Randy Tobler of Overton.

“We don’t claim to have any official standing whatsoever on this,” said Moses of the group. “Right now it is just a few of us who are putting our heads together and playing around with the thing. We don’t know what is going to happen, for sure. We just know that, according to the law passed by the legislature, something is going to happen. And we can either sit back and do nothing and let it happen to us; or we can be a part of it and have a say.”

One point upon which everyone in the group agrees is that there is a significant divide between the educational concerns of rural Moapa Valley and the more urban-centered CCSD.
“Over the years, when we have brought our unique rural concerns to this huge urban district we often have found that we are just speaking different languages,” said Dalley. “The CCSD is usually so focused on the problems of a big city school district that our rural concerns often just don’t make the priority list. Or at least we have to fight very hard to get them there.”

Moses said that this problem is due to a simple lack of representation. He points out that in CCSD School Board District B, which includes a large swath of North Las Vegas as well as the rural communities of Clark County, there are more than 260,000 people. Only about 8,000 of those reside in the Moapa Valley communities.

“The whole issue behind this thing is to get local representation,” Moses said. “The fact is right now we don’t have any representation. With the population numbers being what they are, the focus is going to be on the needs of the 250,000 people over there in Las Vegas above the few that are out here. That’s just a simple fact.”

Dalley said that he has been working on this problem for years now. As far back as 2006, the Moapa Valley Community Education Advisory Board (MVCEAB), with Dalley as its Chair, approached state legislators with a request that rural areas of Clark County be allowed to break away from the CCSD. At that time, they were told that the idea was not politically feasible at the State Legislature.
“We were told that we ought to focus our attention on the idea of becoming empowerment schools, an idea that was just taking hold at the time,” Dalley said.

After 3 years of hard work, the MVCEAB was finally able to convince CCSD officials to name Moapa Valley High School as an empowerment school. At that time, this designation brought more decision-making and budgetary authority to local principals. While this arrangement improved a few things for a time, there were still many areas where conflict existed between the agenda of urban CCSD and the needs of rural schools.

One of the most significant of those arose suddenly last fall with a major controversy over a proposed change to the CCSD sex education curriculum. Parents, both local and all across the district, were shocked to learn that a new curriculum was being developed without their input, and employing activist values and concepts that were way beyond the current curriculum and far outside the scope of what they considered appropriate for their children.

“The sex education situation was really a big turning point for me and my family,” said Charlene Udall. “I felt like our community’s voice just wasn’t being very effectively heard amid all of the clamour. So when this bill was passed I saw it as a perfect opportunity to bring some of those decisions closer to home; decisions that really affect our kids directly.”

Udall served for two years on the empowerment governing committee at Moapa Valley High School under then-principal Grant Hanevold. She said that she was impressed with what was accomplished on that committee simply by local people being allowed to help make decisions for their school.
“It was an awesome feeling to make decisions on behalf of our kids at the school,” said Udall. “It was great to see the direct effect of the decisions that we made. We were able to do a lot because we were people who knew the local situation best.”

AB394 was passed in June during the final few moments of the state legislative session. It authorizes an advisory committee to develop a plan to reorganize the CCSD into smaller local precincts. The number of precincts is not specified in the bill.

According to the bill, the advisory committee is to consist of nine legislators. In the days following passage of the bill those members were appointed. They include five members of the state senate: Joe Hardy, Mo Denis, Aaron Ford, Becky Harris and Michael Roberson; and four members of the Assembly: Olivia Diaz, Dina Neal, Stephen Silberkraus and Lynn Stewart.
In addition to the advisory committee, the bill provides for the appointment of a larger technical advisory committee which is tasked with providing expertise, input, advice and assistance throughout the process.

Members of this committee would include a representative from each of the five incorporated cities in Clark County, a governor appointment, a State Board of Education appointment, a CCSD Trustee, a member of the Clark County Commission, and members representing Clark County Education Association, Urban Chamber of Commerce, Latin Chamber of Commerce, the Nevada Parent Teacher Association and the Las Vegas Asian Chamber of Commerce.

The bill requires the advisory committee to take into account a host of complex elements in its plan; elements that are hoped to ensure that the final arrangement is equitable. One of these is the fair allocation of funding, done on an equal per pupil basis across the board. Other elements include dealing with the authority to issue bonds and raise revenues, personnel contracts and collective bargaining, maintenance of school buildings, transportation, athletics and activities, curriculum and more.

Once the study is complete and recommendations are prepared, the bill requires that the advisory committee submit them to the State Board of Education so that they can be implemented no later than the 2018-2019 school year.

“This reorganization is a matter of law now, it is a bill that has been passed,” Moses said. “It is not a question of whether something will happen or not, something is going to happen. The question now is: What should this community do about it?”

Dalley said that the work of the local group is to try to find the answers to two basic questions.
The first question is whether or not the local communities even want to exert a voice in the process at all.
“There are going to a be a lot of players in this process,” Dalley said. “There is Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson, Mesquite, Boulder City, Clark County, the CCSD and many more. You can be sure that they will all be in the game. But none of them are really representing our unique interests. So do we trust them to look out for us? Or do we express our concerns and engage in the process where we can? That has to be the first question.”

The second question explores what the options are for the local schools amidst a newly reorganized CCSD landscape?
“However those precincts evolve, we need to form an opinion on the direction we want to go in them,” Dalley said. “We need to analyze our options and maybe come up with a priority list of how we would like to end up. For example, if we are thrown into a precinct with Mesquite, we would want to look very closely at how that precinct should look and how we would be represented within it. Key to all of this is that we have adequate representation.”

Finally, the group is not ruling out the possibility that the communities of Moapa and Moapa Valley might be able to form their own school precinct, with its own elected board. They admit, however, that there are a lot of unanswered questions on that front. Most of those have to do with adequate funding.
Moses said that he has spent a good deal of time researching budget numbers. Such an option might just be possible, he says. He points out that, in the state of Nevada, there are currently five or six rural school districts that are significantly smaller in population than the Moapa Valley.

“The argument usually goes that those rural districts require a lot more funding from the state than the urban districts get; and that is true to some extent,” Moses said. “But looking at state funding only is just part of the picture.”

Currently state funding to CCSD runs at about $5,700 per pupil, Moses said. Compare that to, say, White Pine county; which is similar in population to Moapa Valley. They get about $9,200 per student in state funding. That is admittedly a wide gap, Moses admits.

But the rural counties don’t have the tax base that urban counties do, Moses explains. CCSD has another $1 billion of local taxes that it can distribute to its operations. If you factor that money into the equation along with the $5,700 per student in state funding, you come up with a figure of around $10,484 per student in Clark County, Moses said.

“The local tax dollars is what the CCSD never wants to talk about when it is talking about per pupil spending,” Moses said. “But since AB 394 requires the funding allocations to be made with equitable per pupil spending, it would put us on more even ground with other rural districts in the state.”

Moses has made educated guesses on budget figures for a Moapa Valley school precincts. Being a former MVHS principal, he has some experience in that area. With his preliminary numbers he projects that the scenario may be possible. The trouble is, he has had difficulty getting hard spending numbers from the CCSD.

“I have called five different departments at the CCSD and asked how much it costs to run each of our schools and no one was able to tell me,” Moses said. “So are there services that we couldn’t provide in a local school precinct; like transportation or whatever? I don’t know. But I have put together some numbers that I feel are pretty safe and I have come up with several scenarios where it could work.”

The final question for the group is a matter of whether the local community would actually want to take on the responsibility of running its own school precinct, Moses said.
“Could we run a precinct? Yes we probably could,” Moses said. “But do we as a community want to take the responsibility? That is the question we need to ask as a community. How involved do we want to be in this?”

The group is planning to present its ideas in the coming weeks to various community organizations and boards including the MVCEAB, Town Advisory Boards, Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club and other local groups.

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