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March 28, 2024 1:47 am
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Local Autonomy Diluted In Final CCSD Reorganization Plan

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

A controversial plan to reorganize the Clark County School District (CCSD) made it through a bipartisan legislative advisory committee last week with a unanimous vote. The committee, charged with developing a detailed plan to overhaul the fifth largest school district in the nation, approved the plan and accompanying regulations with a 9-0 vote after a nearly 12-hour meeting on Tuesday, August 16.

But the fine print in the regulations to the plan ended up far different from where the reform process had begun. And local advocates, who had spent the past year laboring through the complex political process to procure more autonomy for local schools, found themselves feeling disappointed at the final product.
“Frankly, I can’t make any sense out of it,” said Logandale resident Dr. Larry Moses, who served over the past year on a Technical Advisory Committee formed to assist the legislators in developing the plan. “I have read that thing over and over just looking for something substantive where I can say, ‘Hey we won this one’ and I just don’t see it. I can’t see that much has really changed after all was said and done.”

Logandale resident Lindsey Dalley, who served on a local taskforce to represent Moapa Valley interests through the process was similarly disappointed. He felt that the final product fell far short of the ideals that were upheld in the original plan.
“The planning document had all of this great theory of aligning education funding to where the responsibility for educating children lies: at the local level,” Dalley said. “But in the actual regulations, as they were finally passed, they are just not really very reflective of that plan. It was deeply frustrating.”

The plan proposed to de-centralize the district’s top-down power structure to keep more decision-making at the local school level. It envisioned the principal at each school working collaboratively with a school governance team made up of teachers, staff, parents and community members to make key educational decisions at the school.

Each school is to be funded on a per pupil basis with no less than 85% of the per-pupil funds going directly to the school. The local school governance teams would control how that money was spent.
The central administration of CCSD would be relegated to a service organization for the schools. According to the original plan, the principal would not be required to use services offered by the district. Instead they could be outsourced if it was deemed necessary.

But in the final drafts of the regulations, both Dalley and Moses noted that many of the passages giving autonomy to local schools had been watered down.

The committee had released a revised draft of regulations the week before last week’s meeting. Then committee chair, State Senator Michael Roberson (R-Henderson), had reportedly met with CCSD Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky and members of the CCSD legal team on Monday to discuss the document. That night, another revised copy of the regulations was released.

Throughout the entire process the regulations had gone from a simple seven page outline to a complex 27 page legal document.
“I was pretty frustrated to see the last minute changes made to the regulations on the night before,” Dalley said. “As far as I am concerned, it had the CCSD’s fingerprints all over it.”

One of the major changes made was to the role of CCSD central services in the plan. In the final draft, a long list of services was retained under the direction of the Superintendent and Board of Trustees, rather than at the option of the local school principal and the governance committee.

The meeting room on Tuesday was packed to overflowing with members of the public, many of whom were members of the Education Support Employees Association, the union for CCSD support staff. The union had come down in opposition to the language in the plan which empowered principals to pick and choose which central services they would purchase from CCSD. Many of these union members spoke during public comment requesting the removal of language in the regulations that they perceived might hurt their support staff positions.

“It was the support staff union who were the ones that emasculated it,” said Moses. “It was obvious that they had influenced the (Democrats on the committee) to the point that they were emboldended. And Roberson wanted to get it done with a unanimous vote. So they ended up giving up point after point to get that.”
“In the end the politics won out,” Dalley said. “The room was packed with service union members telling sad stories. It seems that we all want change, but no one wants to do what it takes to make the change. They are still hanging on to the status quo.”

Moses said that the new regulations left virtually no control for the principal over custodians, facilities, transportation or school police. This is about what is currently the case in local schools, he said.

The new regulations as they deal with support staff might even make matters worse than the status quo going forward for school principals, Moses said. “Technically the principals don’t have control over those things now in their building,” Moses said. “But with this it is spelled out legislatively in the law that this is the way it is going to be. Under these regulations, the support people are basically declared as not a part of the local school staff. They are central service employees. That is where this thing has gone.”

But Dalley stops short of saying that nothing was accomplished by the reforms. He admits that there were some modest gains made along the way.
First, the regulations codify advisory boards, such as MVCEAB, into state law. Thus they are no longer formed or dissolved at the will of the CCSD trustees.
Secondly the plan establishes school organizational teams as a permanent structure. They will operate similar to how the Empowerment Team functioned at Moapa Valley High School between 2008 and 2013.
Thirdly, the plan still eliminates layers of middle management between the principal and the superintendent.
Finally, it codifies a degree of local involvement in the hiring of principals and the Assistant Superintendents who oversee them.

Still, none of these advances do very much to add true autonomy to local school teams, Dalley said.
“There is still too much power in the district to make the idea of autonomy very genuine or meaningful,” he said.

But neither Dalley nor Moses are prepared to give up on the process. They encourage local parents and other involved members of the community to stay involved in the process of improving education in the community.
They said they will remain committed to marshalling the new political clout given to local advisory boards by the plan to bring about positive change.
“All we can do now is get together some really strong advisory committees, put pressure where we can, and do it publicly,” Moses said. “It there are problems that arise we need to get it out there. We need to have these committees and local parents to call and put relentless pressure on the different departments.”

Dalley recalled a statement made in the Tuesday meeting by one of the ranking Democrats on the Advisory Board. State Sen. Aaron Ford (D-Las Vegas) had said, “You don’t have to solve all the problems with one piece of legislation. It might take more than one stab at it.”

With that in mind, Dalley said that the recent process may have actually softened the ground for additional reforms to be introduced at the state legislature.
“We have to focus on the little wins that we got,” Dalley said. “If we focus only on what we didn’t get, we will discourage those who have sacrificed the time and effort to make the play. And we can’t do that to people. Besides, discouragement is such an easy path to go down.”
“It is true that I am really frustrated that we didn’t get more,” Dalley added. “But we can’t eliminate hope in this. We have to keep pushing.”

The plan now goes to the State Board of Education and a 12-member Legislative Commission for additional rounds of approval next month. If both bodies approve the plan, it will be subject to full implementation by August of 2017.

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