By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
Two local schools are starting off the year with a much slimmer staffing plan. The staff at Moapa Valley High School (MVHS) and Mack Lyon Middle School (MLMS) are tightening the belt this week due to staffing cuts at the two schools. MVHS has lost its dean of students, a crucial administrative staff position. MLMS has found itself short on teaching positions, putting a crunch on a number of the school’s important programs.
In interviews last week, both school principals stated that the staffing reductions were actually not due to direct cuts to their operating budgets. On the contrary, both principals reported that those budgets had remained more or less the same as in the previous year. The problem is much more complex, they said. It has to do more with gradual changes in the way that rural schools have traditionally been funded. And it delves deeply into issues of equity and access to education programs in rural areas.
The Rural School Challenge
Taken strictly by the numbers, rural schools would struggle just to provide a rounded educational experience for students. In Clark County School District (CCSD), a school’s budget is based on the number of students enrolled in the school. The more students enrolled, the more money in the operating budget. That budget is given to the principal to determine the make up of the staff at the school: how many teachers, administrators, staff, necessary equipment etc. By extension, the budget therefore determines the robustness and variety of programs offered at the school.
The concept makes good sense if all schools in the district were roughly the same size and had the same opportunities, said MVHS principal Hal Mortensen. Unfortunately, they are not.
“The system is kind of designed with larger, urban schools in mind,” said Mortensen. “The budget of more mainstream schools allows for a more diverse pool of teachers and administrators. So they can offer more for students.”
But it becomes a problem when small, rural schools are tasked with putting together a similar comprehensive education program on a much smaller budget.
MLMS principal Ken Paul points to the educational standard set forth on the CCSD website for all middle schools in the district. The passage states that a CCSD middle school must emphasize “… a well balanced educational program includ(ing) mathematics, English, reading, science, social studies, career and technical education, fine arts or exploratory classes, health, and physical education.”
That’s all fine, except that the enrollment at MLMS is just 1/3, or in some cases 1/4, of its larger urban counterparts, Paul said. Therefore the budget is significantly less.
“We just can’t keep up with all that is needed in a comprehensive curriculum if our staff is based purely on our enrollment numbers,” Paul said. “It has always been that way.”
Paul explained that for many years now, that problem has been remedied through a special rural allotment from the CCSD. Knowing that it was impossible, strictly by the enrollment numbers, central administration has always added a number of additional positions to rural schools to keep their programs functioning.
For example, the standard requirements for having a Dean at a high school is an enrollment of 590 students. MVHS is just shy of that at 560. But it had always been agreed that the need for that position was not any less for the lack of thirty students. So the CCSD has, in the past, granted an “off-ratio” Dean position at the school.
Another example is the teaching staff at MLMS. The local middle school’s enrollment alone would justify only about a dozen teachers at the school – this to cover three grades and a total of more than 400 students.
“There is no question in anyone’s mind that this would not be nearly enough to provide a full core program, much less electives,” Paul said.
So CCSD has historically allotted an additional nine teaching positions to the middle school to assure that a rounded education program can stay intact.
This rural allotment approach had always worked well in the past at providing a degree of equity to rural programs. It did, that is, until just the last couple of years.
Rural Allotment in Jeopardy
Mortensen was recently informed that the CCSD would be pulling back the off-ratio Dean position at MVHS, because the school’s enrollment didn’t meet the threshold. So Dr. Lisa Louw, who had been functioning well in the Dean position since 2015, was surplussed from the school. She sought and obtained a new position in Las Vegas.
Mortensen said that this loss has left him in quite a bind. With only two administrators at the school: himself and Assistant Principal Pledger Solomon; the workload will be extraordinarily heavy, Mortensen said.
Mortensen points out that large urban schools in the district usually have three Deans and two Assistant Principals to spread the large workload. But, despite the differences in school size, the workload is not that much less at a small rural school, Mortensen said. In many respects it is exactly the same.
“We have just as many sports events to attend, just as many school activities and dances and field trips,” Mortensen said. “They are asking only two people to divide all of that between us, where five people are covering them at schools in town.”
Unfortunately, that is not the only cuts that have been experienced at MVHS in the past few years. The school has already seen deep cuts to its rural allotment. For example, the school once had three counselors, now it is down to just one. Once the school had 8-9 teachers added to its faculty due to the rural allotment, today the school gets only about half of that.
Mortensen said that many of the school’s elective classes and remedial programs are only functioning because he and the School Operational Team (SOT) have made difficult decisions. They have opted to use the school’s limited budget funds to buy back prep periods from existing teachers who were willing to teach those classes instead of take a teacher prep time. The cost of six such ‘prep buyouts’ has come at a cost of $42,000 to the school’s budget, Mortensen said.
Even with that expense, there are still not enough elective courses to meet student demand this year, Mortensen said. As school starts this week, all of the elective classes are packed, he said.
Of course, even coverage in the school’s core classes is tight. According to Mortensen, several years ago the school had six English teachers. Today that number is now down to three. That is true of all of the core subjects at the school.
“Math is down to three teachers, history is down to three, science is down to three,” Mortensen said. “I really don’t know how much more bare bones we can go.”
Paul tells a similar story at Mack Lyon. He said that for many years, the school had been given nine additional units in its rural allotment. But last year, he was told that number would be cut down to six. This sent ripples throughout the school programs.
“Fortunately, we had a teacher that was ready to retire right then,” Paul said. “So we were able to absorb that without surplussing anyone. We just didn’t hire a replacement.”
But the loss of that position had a deep impact on programs at the school. That teacher happened to be the art instructor for the school. So the loss of one teaching position completely shut down the entire Art program at the school.
“To tell the truth, that program was vitally important to a lot of students,” Paul said. “We had 50 percent of our 7th and 8th graders who were taking art and they were loving it. Now it is just no longer there. It is not an option.”
To make up for other lost positions, Paul and his SOT members have had to make tough decisions similar to those at MVHS. They have spent significant school budget funding for prep buyouts to keep many of the school’s Career and Technology classes running. These are popular classes among students including subjects like Computer Coding, Robotics and Future Cities. This last program is so successful that last year’s team won the state championship and travelled to Washington DC to compete nationally.
“Without putting those dollars toward prep buyouts, we were in real danger of losing those programs,” Paul said. “They would have been gone, just like that. There wasn’t much of a choice.”
Battle Over Equity
When he began getting word from CCSD administrators that the rural allotment cuts would be imposed, Paul said that he immediately began advocating for keeping the allotment in tact.
“I have been emailing and calling for the past year, multiple times, to try and get something worked out, and haven’t really been able to get anywhere,” he said.
One problem is that the rural allotment had never been quantified. There was no uniform and consistent district policy that determined exactly what a rural school was and what additional staffing levels were needed for it to meet CCSD objectives.
“I have been asking for exactly what the rural allotment should be, so that I at least have a starting point, and no one can answer that question,” Paul said. “It seems to be a pretty fluid thing.”
With no codified standard in place, local principals fear that the administrative memory about the unique needs of rural schools may be fading quickly within CCSD central.
“I’m afraid that we are losing ground fast on this,” Paul said. “That’s why I don’t want to just relent and let go of it. There is so much focus on the urban equity issues out there that pretty soon we will completely lose any idea of what the rural allotment was ever for. That would be disastrous for our schools.”
Mortensen points out that reducing positions to the smaller specialty schools in urban settings is much different than doing so in the rurals.
“Students in small schools in Las Vegas have other options available if a program at their school disappears,” he said. “They can go to charters or magnet schools or enroll in other programs. In the rural areas, our students don’t have those options.”
SOT Support
Fortunately, the two local principals have had the backing of strong and supportive School Organizational Teams behind them.
In May, the SOT at Lyon Middle School sent a letter to CCSD Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky asking him to address the rural allotment problem.
“In a continuous downward trend, our school has endured the reduction of the rural school entitlement teacher units from nine to six, in spite of the fact that our enrollment numbers have consistently increased,” the letter states. “This loss impedes our ability to provide an equitable, balanced and comprehensive middle school program.”
The letter was signed by Paul, his Assistant Principal Aimee Lewis and the eight members of the SOT. It was also signed by CCSD Associate Superintendent Jeff Hybarger.
Since the letter was sent, SOT members and school administrators have continued to send follow up messages to key CCSD administrators. But they have received very little response.
“It has been very disheartening and frustrating,” said MLMS parent and SOT member Aimee Houghtalon. “We have tried to follow all of the steps and guidelines given to us on how a SOT is supposed to function. We have gone through the proper channels and made a clear case. But we haven’t heard anything back.”
The Legal Facet
Parent members of the SOT are starting to think about taking the matter a step further; past merely being an equity issue, to the point of making the rural allotment a legal matter. They have found language in the law that was written specifically to protect rural schools in this situation.
AB 469 was passed by a bipartisan effort in the state legislature, with the intent to completely reorganize and reform the CCSD. The law contains a mandate for a major restructuring of school funding, changing it to a per pupil calculation.
But in the process of drafting the law, there were worries among legislators that small specialty schools and rural schools would end up severely underfunded due to their lower enrollment numbers. So they included a section stating that the new funding formulas could not negatively affect the proportion of funding that had historically been given to schools as their rural allotment.
Thus, if the entire district took a budget cut, then rural cuts were appropriate as well, as long as the rural allotment remained proportionally. But isolated or random cuts could not be made to that rural allotment, according to the law.
“Part of our message is that, in cutting these positions, the district is violating state law,” said Houghtalen. “It is not just an issue of what is fair and equitable for our kids; though that should really be enough. But it is also a matter of following the intent of the law.”
But last week, CCSD officials seemed to be using the ambiguities that have always surrounded the rural allotment to justify the recent staffing cuts. In a statement made in a Monday, August 7 meeting of the Legislative Advisory Committee over the implementation of AB469, Skorkowsky addressed concerns that had been raised in public comments about the rural allotment.
“What you have to remember about those additional positions is that, in a lot of cases, they were sort of an administrative gift to those schools,” Skorkowsky said.
But local advocates insist that this argument is immaterial and irrelevant. “It doesn’t matter where the allotment came from,” said Logandale resident Lindsey Dalley, who serves on the Moapa Valley Community Education Advisory Board (MVCEAB). “Whether they are gifts or whether they are somehow justified by some arcane calculation; it doesn’t matter. They are part of the rural allotment that has always been needed to provide a balanced program at our rural schools. That has been in place for many years now. And the law is clear, it has to be protected proportionally. It can’t just be taken away.”
Next Steps
As students return to school this week, it is still unclear what the solution will be.
Paul mentioned that he had travelled to Las Vegas last week for a face-to-face meeting with CCSD Chief Student Achievement Officer Mike Barton on the subject. In that meeting, Paul was able to present the case once again for preserving, or at least quantifying, the rural allotment.
“I felt like it was a good meeting,” Paul said. “I was able to sit down and explain how the rural units have worked and I was definitely heard and understood. There were some ‘ah-ha’ moments when talking about the differences of rural schools. Generally, I think that they have good intentions, but they are so understandably wrapped up in big urban issues and problems that the rural voice can kind of get lost unless we keep advocating for it.”
Despite the fact that Paul was meeting with the second in command at CCSD, he was not able to get a final answer on the matter. Thus, he will still be starting the school year dangerously short on teaching positions at his school.
Nevertheless, SOT members have vowed to carry on the efforts of advocating for the rural allotment.
“We are not going to give up on this,” Houghtalen said. “It is just too important for us to just roll over and decide that nothing can be done. We have to do something.”
Houghtalen said that she and other SOT members plan to mobilize parents in the community to send a barrage of requests to CCSD officials seeking, what they see as, equity for rural students and compliance with state law.
“We have decided that, if all else fails, we would enact what we are calling Operation Inundate,” Houghtalen said. “We will get the whole community behind to advocate what is best for our students. We want to show that it is not just a few crazy parents that are engaged on this, but it is the whole community.”
