Parents Take New Tack In Quest For Local Voice In Education

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

A group of local parents have found a new focus in an ongoing push for more local decision-making in Moapa Valley schools. On Friday, January 27, the group attended a meeting of the Nevada Legislative Commission in Las Vegas. They were there to show support for a set of regulations proposed to guide the implementation of Assembly Bill 448, passed in the 2015 State Legislature.

AB 448 established a new school district in the state, called the Achievement School District (ASD). The bill aim to improve chronically under-achieving schools in the state. Once identified, such schools would be pulled from their geographic school districts and placed under the supervision of the ASD. These schools would then be converted to achievement charter schools.

According to the bill, the new charters would be allowed to use the same buildings and facilities at no additional cost to the charter. Education funding would be allocated directly to the new charter schools through a per pupil formula.
The idea for AB 448 has struggled to gain traction with its primary target: the underperforming schools of the inner city. Parent groups in those schools have feared that the process will take away their choice and cut them out of the governance structure.

But local parents have seen AB448 as an opportunity to break free of what they view as the endless red tape of the Clark County School District (CCSD). They see it as a chance for the Moapa Valley community of schools to form its own charter and govern its own destiny.
“Parents in our communities are so tired of CCSD and the direction that its bureaucracy is taking our schools,” said parent Wendy Jensen of Moapa. “There are many parents that think if things continue to go the way they are, they will have to pull their kids out of school and find other alternatives to public education. Parents want more of a voice in their kids schools, we want to feel welcome at the schools and have our involvement make a difference.”

Jensen believes that AB448 may be the next logical step in the quest to have that kind of local voice in education. This has become a common hope among involved parents.
“What I have noticed right off the bat is that you sit down and chat with parents for about 20 minutes on this and that is about all it takes; they are in,” said Logandale resident Lindsey Dalley. “It is not a hard sell.”
Dalley is a long-time member of the Moapa Valley Community Education Advisory Board (MVCEAB). Over the past two years, he has also lead a taskforce to engage in the recent legislative process to reorganize the CCSD.

Throughout that process Dalley, and other local advocates, had hoped that the CCSD bureaucracy would be broken down giving way to more autonomy in local schools. But they ended up feeling somewhat disappointed in the final outcome as special interests, CCSD officials and members of the legislative committee stripped the plan of much of its meaningful reforms in the final hours of the process.

Going back to the drawing board, Dalley discovered some of the details of AB 448. Though it originally was intended for to address underperforming urban schools, Dalley wondered if it could also be applied to rural schools that were being similarly underserved by the CCSD bureaucracy.

Dalley contacted State Education Department officials and state legislators to see if parents in a community might petition the ASD directly for their schools’ inclusion into the new district. He envisioned a situation where parents, school administrators, teachers and support staff would collaborate in writing a new charter to fit the unique educational needs of their community. A local non-profit organization could then be formed to operate the charter. The ASD would oversee the implementation of that charter in local schools. But the local organization would make the real decisions, within the scope of state law, on the values and operations guiding the charter.

The answer that came back from both legislators and ASD officials gave Dalley hope to move forward with the idea. They found nothing in the wording of the law that prevented such an arrangement. And they pledged to include language clarifying the matter into the regulations being presented before the Legislative Commission.
That is why the parent group showed up at the January 27 meeting: to advocate for the new regulations.
“I am watching parents struggle as the CCSD bureaucracy and trustees have slowly strangled meaningful reform,” Dalley told the commission in a public comment. “ASD comes as a breath of fresh air for parents who want effective parental involvement at school, understand what that looks like and are willing to do the heavy lifting. Moapa Valley is ready for that challenge.”

Others in the group testified of the difficulty parents have faced in trying to be involved in meaningful ways in CCSD schools.
Logandale resident Marquessa Aikele, who serves on the MVHS School Operations Team (SOT) told of her disappointment in being limited in her involvement. MVHS, by mandate of CCSD policy is facing a reduction of two teachers from its staff and is expected to lose its Dean in the next school year. But none of these major decisions were matters that were even open for discussion by the SOT, a group established by the recent reorganization to make key decisions for the local schools.
“I went to the most recent SOT meeting where they were talking about the budget,” Aikele said. “I was looking forward to how much we could be involved in finding innovative solutions and making some changes that affect our local area. But there was hardly anything that we could really discuss. We were tied down at every turn by central CCSD policies.”

Logandale resident Karen Jensen, who serves on the SOT at Bowler Elementary, had a similar story. She told of how the school is desperately in need of a new Math curriculum, but had no budget for it. Members of the school’s Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) stepped up and devoted funds to purchase a new curriculum. SOT members, including teachers at the school, researched extensively to find a math curriculum that was proven to yield results. But their selection was not on the list of approved curricula by CCSD. That list only gave two options, neither of which had been desirable by the SOT members, Jensen said.

“It seems that every time there is an issue or a problem; despite the fact that we can solve our own problems; we are unable to do so because of the regulations, red tape and control that are mandated on us by the CCSD,” Karen Jensen told the Commission. “I have become alarmed at the lack of local impact that we have had in our schools at almost every aspect of our kids’ education.”

At the meeting, Commission member and State Assemblyman James Oscarson, in a statement, backed up what the local parents said about the difficulty of working with CCSD.
“Everything that these folks have said is accurate,” Oscarson said. “I have been there first hand and seen it. There is no consistency, there is no respect, there are no mutual discussions that happen. They are dictated to by CCSD and told how they are going to educate their kids without any kind of input from them to do that. We should give these folks the chance to be a part of the process, rather than alienating them and making sure that they are not able to be engaged.”

But the Democrat legislators on the Commission felt that the regulations as presented went too far. Many of them had been opposed to the bill when it was presented in 2015. Now they felt that the bill itself should be taken up again in the next state legislative session and clarified further there, rather than approving the proposed regulations.

Commission chairman State Senator Michael Roberson pointed out that a refusal by the commission to approve the regulations would not change the law which had been passed in AB 448. That law would still be in place, he said.
“We are faced with a choice today,” Roberson said. “Either we pass the regulations that will address and clarify issues that have been raised with AB448; or we don’t pass them and the law is implemented anyway without those concerns being addressed. That is the real question before us today.”

In the end, the vote was split 6-6 along party lines and the regulations were not instituted. But Roberson’s point that the law remains in place, with or without regulations, gave hope to the local parent group.
“We were a little disappointed because it seemed like everybody favored choice no matter what side they were on,” said Wendy Jensen. “But we decided to pursue and see what other options were out there. We got a plan in place and decided we were still going to try and petition into the ASD and see what they would say.”
According to the law, a majority of parents in a school must petition the ASD in order to be considered. That means as few as 50 percent plus one is needed to start the ball rolling.

But all of the involved parents recognized immediately that they needed to first open communications with local teachers and principals on the matter. The message needed to be clear that the teachers and administrators in local schools were not being viewed as part of the problem.
“We are certainly not doing this because we want to git rid of any of our teachers,” Wendy Jensen said. “As parents, we are in complete support of our teachers and we want to help them in their work. We just feel like they need to be set free from the red tape of CCSD to be able to do what they are already so good at.”

Dalley said that this effort was not really about making radical changes to local education. Rather it is about returning things to a past state of local control that was once effective in the community.
“We are not looking to change things,” Dalley said. “On the contrary, we are looking to return things back to the way they have been in the past. The fact is the change has already happened. We have seen a gradual shift over the years towards central CCSD and away from local governance. We’d like to see it return back to a more local model.”

Karen Jensen points out that this shift toward CCSD central control has exposed what might become a dangerous trend for local public schools.
“There are parents who are concerned about issues that are being pushed by CCSD; issues like gender neutral restrooms and radical sex education curriculum,” she said.

If those things were instituted and formalized by CCSD, many people would pull their kids out of school and look for other education options, Jensen claimed. That could seriously disrupt funding and staffing levels at local schools, she said.
“Our valley is not big enough to absorb that kind of loss,” Jensen added. “It would be much better if we could try and keep our schools together and unified if we can. We see this as one way to do that.”

Dalley acknowledges that it is still very early in the process and there are a myriad of unanswered questions. This is understandably daunting to teachers and administrators who may fear the effects of change on their careers, he said. But Dalley is confident that, allowed to do so, the community could come up with answers that will satisfy all parties.
“As long as we structure the details so that we, as a community, are determining the outcome, I think we can make a success of it,” Dalley said. “As parents, teachers and administrators, we are so used to not having a say in our educational concerns. We are so used to having someone tell us what we are going to do. But that is just the problem. As long as the details are determined by us, together, here in this community, I am confident we can come to the answers that suit our unique circumstances.”