By VERNON ROBISON
The Progress
A handful of Virgin Valley Community Education Advisory Board (VVCEAB) members met together with local school principals on Thursday, July 29 to provide community input to a Clark County School District (CCSD) process that will determine how federal COVID funding should be spend by the district.
The session was originally supposed to be an agenda item on a full meeting of the VVCEAB which was scheduled that night. But the VVCEAB lacked a quorum. So VVCEAB Chairwoman Jodi Thornley cancelled the meeting and moved the group to a smaller conference room to hold the community input session apart from the VVCEAB agenda. The input session did not fall under Open Meeting Law requirements.
Community input sought
Thornley explained that Clark County School District (CCSD) officials had reached out to the community asking if this sessions could be held. This session, as well as many others being held district-wide would gather input on how to best spend nearly $800 million in federal funds coming to CCSD. The funds were meant to offset educational deficits caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“They wanted people actually from each community to lead these meetings,” Thornley explained. “So I volunteered and went to the trainings to lead this meeting.”
Thornley said that she would be preparing a report of the input from the meeting. This would be sent directly to CCSD who would then forward all of the reports to the Kenny Guinn Foundation. The Foundation would then process all of the data and develop a master report from it back to the CCSD.
Why not let SOTs decide?
Thornley said that CCSD officials had distributed a list of questions for the community groups to consider in the input sessions. She began reading the questions to the group.
“Here is really the answer to all of the questions,” interjected City Council member Wes Boger who was in attendance for the session. “Shouldn’t our answer be to just let the schools decide how the money would best be spent for their students? Isn’t that the role of the SOTs (School Organizational Teams) anyway?”
But Hughes Middle School principal Maurice Perkins said that this scenario was rather unlikely. Perkins, who serves with other principals on a central CCSD budget committee, said that when the committee became aware that the $800 million in federal funds was coming, the principals in the group had emphasized that the funds should flow directly to the schools to determine best uses.
CCSD Superintendent Jesus Jara had reigned in those suggestions, Perkins said.
“That was the question that was posed in the meetings,” Perkins said. “And the message that came back to us was: ‘That’s not how it is going to happen. That’s not how this is going to work.’”
Perkins added that the district had already gone about spending large portions of the money. Part of it was used to fund a major summer school program over the past couple of months, Perkins said.
“We did have local input on how summer school was conducted this year,” he said.
In addition, comprehensive new curricula and new textbooks district-wide were being funded by the federal COVID dollars. Other programs to improve mental health for students and to quickly identify kids at mental health risk were also included, Perkins said.
“These things are already done and paid for,” Perkins said.
“Well, it sounds like the school district has already figured out what they want,” said VVCEAB member Nick Montoya who was present for the discussion. “So the question is: Why are we here? Is this just another ploy where CCSD is wanting to rubbing everyone’s back and making us feel good? Or is there some purpose to all this?”
Behind-the-scenes politics
Thornley said that, though the district had moved forward in spending some of the funds, the community input requirement had loomed more and more important in recent weeks.
“It is not just us out in the rurals that are sounding off,” Thornley said. “There are a lot of people and groups in Las Vegas that feel like these things, that they already want to spend the funds on, are not what is needed on the ground in the schools. People all over the district are speaking out about it.”
Thornley said that despite the messaging that had initially come to school administrators from Jara, there were higher political forces at work on the issue.
“Yes, that is what we were hearing from the district,” she said. “But Congressman (Steven) Horsford was telling us something quite different. He was saying: ‘No, the money is going to the schools and community input will be important!’.”
“Now all of a sudden we have these input meetings going on from CCSD,” Thornley added. “So there is still some behind-the-scenes work going on here.”
Thornley acknowledged that it was a slim chance that the outlying communities would get much funding to use on the unique needs identified by rural schools. But she insisted that the process of giving input was still important.
“So this process all happens and the district comes out with a plan announcing where it is spending the money,” Thornley said. “If nothing that we need is on that list, then we go back as a group and nail it home. We say: ‘Look you promised to help us!’ And we fight for it. But we can’t do any of that if we don’t give the input to begin with.”
Personnel solutions
Perkins suggested that one way to direct more money to the SOTs would be to ask the district to use the COVID funds to provide counselors to the schools. This would satisfy the emotional/mental health element of the funding.
“If these funds would pay for the counselors that are in our buildings, that would open up $80,000 in strategic budget funds for every school to use how they see fit,” Perkins said.
Virgin Valley Elementary School principal Matt Bennett said that his school was having a difficult time finding staff for certain support positions because the district payscale on those positions is so low.
“I can’t find people to fill these positions because they can go to McDonald’s and make more,” Bennett said. “So we don’t have to hire with the funds, but we could look at those support staff payscales and give everyone in those positions a 50 percent raise, or a 25 percent raise or something. At least then we are more in line with what McDonalds and Walmart are paying”
Bennett also extended this issue to the teacher shortage problem at CCSD. He pointed out that the district currently has between 600 and 700 open teaching positions which, by necessity, must be filled by long-term substitutes.
“If you figure just 20 kids per class, that will be 10,000 students across the district who are going to start school on Day 1 without a permanent teacher,” Bennett said. “What kind of disservice are we doing to those kids?”
COVID-related needs
Virgin Valley High School principal Riley Frei stated that the focus of the input should be on ways to address the impact of the pandemic on education.
“These funds were not meant to be a solution to all problems with contemporary education, but to mitigate for COVID,” he said.
Frei suggested that funding be put into intervention programs at the elementary school level where much of the educational damage was done during the pandemic.
“So we move all the screening and everything way back into the early grades and try to get kids on track as fast as we possibly can,” Frei said.
Another good use of funding would be to provide instructional coaches at every campus as a resource to teachers, Frei suggested.
“If we had teacher coaches who were also data experts, then we could move the numbers that we pile onto our teachers so much,” Frei said. “Right now they are required to teach and be data experts and to crunch numbers all at once. We require all this work on the data side and our teachers don’t have time to plan instruction and really dig deep into teaching and learning.”
Back to local control
Montoya asked a question that brought the discussion back to the concept of bringing the funds to local schools to decide.
“Why don’t they just do what the state does and give the schools so much money per student,” Montoya said. “According to my calculation that divide up to around $2,500 per student to the school. Then the schools can do what they most need with it.”
Montoya calculated that, under such a scenario, Hughes Middle School alone, with its 550 students, the middle school would receive $1.3 million of the federal funds.
“Do you think you could make that work over three years for your programs,” Montoya asked Perkins.
“That’d definitely be nice!” Perkins answered.
“I think it would be number one on everyone’s list to just let the schools decide,” Perkins agreed. “Giving a per pupil amount would be a fair way to do it.”
The only hitch would be that the spending would have to be sustainable, Perkins added. If not, the school would be right back where it started again after the three years, he said.
“In three years the funding is gone all of a sudden,” Perkins said. “At that point, we have become reliant on all these positions and the only way to continue funding them is to raise class sizes. I mean isn’t that the 20-year history of the Clark County School District right there?”
