‘Think about the students every day’: How 6 CCSD schools made major ratings jumps

Nicole Martin moved around the classroom so much that it was difficult to get a picture of her.

That’s because she is on a mission to keep engagement high, for a class she referred to as being part of the “Tik Tok generation.”

“Give me your favorite pun,” she told the fifth-grade class, who raised their hands eagerly from their “flexible seating” around the room, ranging from couches to swivel chairs.

After teaching at Antonello Elementary School for 26 years, Martin has had to learn how to adjust students with lower attention spans than in the past.

It’s teachers like Martin who “think about the students every day,” that helped the school increase from a one-star school to a three-star school in just one year, Principal Kathi Rozek said.

The school is one of six in the Clark County School District that made the two-star jump in a single year. The statewide system judges schools out of five stars based on academic achievement, growth, English language proficiency, opportunity gaps and student engagement. In a state in which half of the schools have either one or two stars, the Review-Journal sought to find out how some schools managed to make the leap.

The answer: data-driven approaches, and a positive culture for teachers and parents.

Looking at the data

At Lyon Middle School, which went from three to five stars, a 21-point jump, former Principal Jaydel Wilson said he uses “every data point we could.”

Heard Elementary School, a magnet school in east Las Vegas that increased from one to three stars, used regular testing throughout the year to evaluate how students were doing, according to Principal Rebecca Mestaz Lyon. The school then used that data for smaller group work and instructional approaches.

Data is also especially important for English language learners. Despite that group making up 16 percent of the district, the district has struggled to meet the needs for these students. In the state report card released in September, English language learners demonstrated lower proficiency rates than their peers: 11 percent were proficient in math, and 11.3 in English language arts. Seven percent of English language learners were proficient in the English language.

Rozek said that her English Language learners had shown around 24 percent proficiency last year and were up to 66 percent this past year.

Absenteeism

Chronic absenteeism has plagued schools across the country since COVID, and CCSD has been no exception.

CCSD’s chronic absentee rate was higher than the rest of the state, with almost 1 in 3 students missing 10 percent or more of school days as compared with the rest of the state, where 1 in 4 students were chronically absent.

The city of North Las Vegas also has been a large help for Antonello, Rozek said. The city provided a grant toward chronic absenteeism. The city helped secure and give out $10 million in grant funds in the fiscal year 2024, many of which were “micro grants” for schools with projects focused on student achievement, chronic absenteeism, teacher retention or family engagement, according to the city’s communications office.

Last year, Rozek said, Antonello had a 32 percent rate of chronic absenteeism. In the past year, the school has instituted a number of challenges to encourage attendance, ranging from classroom challenges in which classes get to build a rocket ship and win prizes after 10 days of perfect attendances, to parental outreach and support groups for individuals who struggle with absenteeism.

Heard similarly focused on incentives for attendance, including consistent follow up with students who missed school.

Several of the schools also mentioned parental involvement as key to combatting absenteeism, as well as several other issues that students face.

At Lyon, Wilson said the stands are always packed for events and parent support is very high.

“The parents are where it’s at. When the whole family is involved in their education, that’s when you have the best success,” Martin said.

Class sizes

Antonello and Lyon schools have the added benefit of having no teacher vacancies, a rare find in a district that started the year with more than 1,000 vacancies.

Martin credited Rozek for “protecting class sizes,” which has helped her and other teachers at Antonello be able to provide the individualized attention needed.

Overcrowded class sizes have been a top concern for the district in previous years, though this year’s report card showed an average size for CCSD as a bit more than 20, with science classes having the largest at 23, according to the state’s data.

All the principals who spoke to the Review-Journal emphasized that the hard work of teachers is essential to the success.

Martin, who has been a teacher at the school for 26 years, emphasized the importance of staff being on the same page. As a strategist, she works to help new teachers, and she said they all can learn from each other.

The importance of stars

For some, there is also a question of the importance of the star rating and what it means for those inside the school.

Before even entering Crestwood Elementary School’s website, a banner alerts the viewer: “We are now a 3-star school!”

The school did not respond to request for an interview, nor did Mackey Middle School or Scherkenbach Elementary School, both of which also increased by two stars.

When asked if stars were something she consciously thought about, Rozek laughed.

“Always,” she said.

Mestaz Lyon said that the star increase was a “validation of the hard work.”

“It’s like the front of the house and the back of the house,” she said. “If our students are learning, by very nature of that, our stars are going to increase.”

Mestaz Lyon said that if she only focused on stars, she would probably do things a little bit differently, focusing more explicitly on the tests at the end of the year.

For Martin, stars can place a lot of pressure on test scores.

“We have been an amazing school all the time, but now other people recognize it, too,” Martin said. “There are a lot of things that are out of our control, but we really try to impact the things that we can control.”

Contact Katie Futterman at kfutterman@reviewjournal.com. Follow @ktfutts on X.