CCSD Board Approves $43 Million In Budget Cuts

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

The Clark County School District (CCSD) Board of Trustees approved roughly $43.3 million in budget cuts during a meeting held on Thursday, August 24 in Las Vegas. In the 4-2 vote, the trustees followed a recommendation from CCSD staff on how to best manage a budget deficit in the district of between $50 million and $60 million.

Central office budget reductions totalling $11.8 million – or 27 percent of the total cuts – were approved as part of the package.
But about $17.4 million of the cuts will have to be absorbed by individual strategic budgets of schools across the district. These budgets are directly administered by school principals in coordination with School Organizational Teams (SOT) at each school.

In addition, another $14 million must be trimmed from programs and departments that provide direct services to the schools. These services include things like special education resources, student services, summer school sites, instructional design services and more.

Between the individual school strategic budget reductions and the cuts to direct school services, the impact to schools will amount to around 73 percent of the total budget cuts.

The CCSD budget shortfall was said to originate from a number of factors – including a modest district-wide drop in overall student populaton, less than expected state funds coming in, and a collective bargaining arbitration that ruled against the district and in favor of the administrators union.
The shortfall is still just an estimate, according to district officials. Financial figures from fiscal year 2017 are still being finalized.

Voting against the recommended cuts were Trustees Chris Garvey and Kevin Child. They argued that more detailed budget information was needed before the decision should be made.
If these cuts play out as expected, it will bring some difficult decisions for local principals and their SOTs. In interviews last week, principals of two local schools emphasized that it was still unclear just how their budget numbers would end up. But they both feared that strategic budget funding, which had been carefully set aside to shore up some of their schools’ more budget-poor programs, might now be in jeopardy.

Moapa Valley High School principal Hal Mortensen said that he has been sacrificing to save up funding that he hoped would bolster some of the school’s underfunded Career and Technical programs. These include elective programs at the school that continue to be popular among students, he said.
“We wanted to take some of those programs to the next level,” Mortensen said.

One example is the school’s popular culinary arts program. Currently the class is operating with the equivalent to a household kitchen facility. Mortensen had plans to expand the space and upgrade it to a full commercial kitchen.

Other plans for the saved strategic budget funds included equipment and supplies for the school’s woodshop, the graphic design studio, art and ceramics and other programs, Mortensen said.
He added that he and the SOT members had made a calculated decision, with plenty of advanced planning, to save the money for these improvements.
“We actually started from the standpoint of possibly adding some new programs,” Mortensen said. “We heard from different community members that they wanted us to add things like auto shop, robotics, manufacturing or virtual reality. We even went out touring other Career and Technical schools in the district to see what they were doing. But our final conclusion was: Why not strengthen the great programs that we already have right now?”

So Mortensen and the SOT set some priorities, made some plans and saved budget money for the improvements. Now those funds may have to go towards closing the budget shortfall, Mortensen said.
“We might end up with neither the new programs, nor the improvements to the existing ones,” Mortensen said. “It is frustrating.”

Mack Lyon Middle School principal Ken Paul paints a similar dilemma for his school. Paul said that he was fairly comfortable that he would not lose any more teaching positions at the school.
But the budget issues at Lyon were bad enough already. Because of a reduction in the school’s rural allotment, Lyon is already starting the year with three teaching units short. That has eliminated the school’s popular Art program and cut back on a credit retrieval program that helped students struggling to pass grade level.

Even so, Paul and his SOT had also been saving money for future technology needs at the school. Currently, every student at Lyon is issued a Chromebook computer to use for the school year. This technology was first supplied to the school last year through private grant funding.
“Of course, there won’t be any grant funding to replace those computers when that is needed in the future,” Paul explained.

So Paul had planned to reserve enough strategic budget money each year to buy a grade level’s worth of Chromebooks every two years as replacements.
But with the proposed budget cuts, its may become necessary to use those saved funds for something even more urgent, Paul said.
“In the short run, I think that we would be okay (with the cuts),” Paul said. “But eventually it will catch up to us. So it is a pretty big hit that we would take.”

Local education advocates say that there was not nearly enough cuts to CCSD Central Administration in the recommendation. Logandale resident Larry Moses, who spent a year representing rural schools on a special Technical Advisory Committee to study the reorganization of the CCSD. said that too often the district looksfirst at teachers in the classroom when it is time to cut the budget.
“Here is the problem,” Moses said. “Only 17,000 of the district’s 40,000 employees are actual teachers in the classroom. Yet that is always the place where the cuts start.”

That means that a full 48 percent of CCSD employees are not teachers in the classroom, Moses said. Instead they are central office administration, education specialists, support staff, bus drivers, facility maintenance, law enforcement and more, he said.
“Of course, those are important things,” Moses concluded. “But when your basic fundamental job is teaching kids in the classroom, and your overall staffing is so far leaning toward everything but teachers, it just seems like the classroom is the last place to make cuts.”