By VERNON ROBISON
The Progress
The Nevada State Board of Education met in a rare and historic joint session with the Clark County School District (CCSD) Board of Trustees on Thursday, Sept. 30. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a more effective implementation of state law with respect to the decentralization of the CCSD and allowing greater autonomy to local school precincts.
During the meeting, Board of Education member Mark Newburn emphasized that the law to reorganize CCSD, passed in the state legislature in 2015, was born out of frustration.
“There was a widespread belief at that time that the CCSD could not reform itself,” Newburn said. “And that the legislature would have to come in with a heavy hand and lay out a structure to try to move the decision making down to the schools, to the teachers and to the parents.”
Five years later, many school administrators, teachers, parents and community members were still complaining to the State Board that the CCSD had still not fully complied with the reorganization law.
Thus the State Board had invited CCSD Trustees and other officials to meet together to discuss the matter and try to establish a path forward.
Board member Katie Dockweiler, who served as chair for a special subcommittee to investigate the matter, gave a report to the board during the meeting on her group’s findings.
The subcommittee looked into several different areas where the public had alleged that the district had not acted in full compliance with the law. The first of these was to give school principals full autonomy in the hiring of teachers and staff in their buildings. Another topic was the treatment of Service Level Agreements (SLA) which were intended to allow school principals the flexibility to either purchase support services from the district or to contract with outside entities to provide those services. A third topic was dealing with the right of School Organization Teams (SOTs) to carry-over surplus funds from their budget from one year to another.
Dockweiler said that the subcommittee had found that these items had not yet been addressed fully by the CCSD and that there were areas of noncompliance.
During public comment period, the Board heard from union officials, school administrators, teachers, parents and education advocates who reinforced these findings.
Mack Lyon Middle School principal Ken Paul spoke specifically about the struggle over SLA spending at his Overton school. He said that the Lyon SOT had engaged with CCSD officials about instances where money could be more efficiently spent through local contracting on service agreements. But the autonomy to do so had not been given.
“The (District) needs to let go of the full measure of per pupil funding to the school,” Paul said. “Even if most schools choose to pay for or transfer back those funds for SLAs to central services, the act of a school purchasing choice would be impactful.”
“When decision-making in money is closer to the school and the community, then academics and operational efficiency would go up,” Paul added.
Other CCSD school principals commented about not being given the full decision-making authority in the realm of staffing decisions required by law. They talked about their schools and students being harmed by a district requirement for schools to take teachers who had been surplused from other schools, often because they had been ineffective there.
“Over the years, our school has been the recipient of several inadequate and low performing educators” said David Rose, principal of Francis Courtney Junior High School in Las Vegas. “Placement of inadequate teachers at our schools diminishes my ability and our abilities to take the school forward. For these reasons I request that you ensure the implementation of (the reorganization law) allowing principals the authority and autonomy to decide who does and who does not come into their schools to teach our kids.”
Mack Lyon SOT Chairwoman Syrissa Jolley emphasized that the CCSD had been slow to allow decisions to be passed down to the local level as the law dictates.
“Instead of giving local precincts decision-making autonomy, the district has taken more control, which is why this law was originated to begin with,” she said. “At Mack Lyon, we have a very high-functioning SOT. But our meeting minutes are mostly taken up by the obstacles that the district puts before us.”
Dockweiller said that her subcommittee’s recommendation was to establish an oversight committee or appoint an external evaluator which would shepherd the district more toward full compliance with the existing law to resolve these problems.
In his board comment, Mark Newburn said it was time that the CCSD work together with the State Board to bring full compliance. He recalled that immediately after the law had been passed in 2015, the CCSD Board of Trustees had filed a lawsuit against the State Board of Education over matters of implementation. This created a broken relationship at the time between the two bodies, Newburn said.
Five years later and with an entirely new slate of CCSD Trustees, Newburn said it was now time to try and mend that relationship. This meeting was a step towards that goal, he said.
“The debate for the legislature five years ago was not about whether they’re going to do it or not,” Newburn recalled. “The debate was: ‘Are we going to try this eponymous model? Or are we going to break up the school district?’ That may still be the long term two solutions.”
“Right now, no one has a greater vested interest in the success of the reorg than the CCSD does,” Newburn added. “So we are stepping in after a number of years to try and address these problems. The reorg was a test to see if it was possible, with strong oversight, to reform the district. It is not a test that the CCSD can afford to fail. So I think we are all here to try to prevent that failure.”
