Superintendent says cuts, poverty, high enrollment force changes
Clark County schools are caught in a "perfect storm" of budget cuts, childhood poverty and a huge enrollment, Superintendent Dwight Jones said Thursday in his annual State of the District address at Chaparral High School.
But Clark County School District can’t just cower in a culvert, hoping to weather the storm.
"Leaders have to lead," he said.
When the School Board hired him a year ago, Jones said, it charged him with a weighty task: "Raise our achievement. Rebuild our reputation."
To do that, he said, school officials must change the curriculum to raise academic standards, closely track student progress as they do that, and give high-performing schools the freedom to be creative. In short, they must make drastic changes to turn the struggling district around.
The district often is listed near the bottom in the country for student achievement. Only half of the district’s 20,000 seniors started the year on track to graduate. One in 10 who do graduate go on to earn a college degree in 10 years, which is half of the national average.
That can’t be changed by lowering the bar, he said, noting that the district is eliminating remedial courses.
"Our kids are smarter than we give them credit for," he said.
Instead of remedial courses, teachers will intervene with struggling students and come up with a plan to catch them up, whether it’s after-school tutoring or individual attention. Those students will have their own mentors to guide them back on track.
That was started in high schools last fall when the new Nevada Growth Model identified thousands of struggling secondary students. The district, with the state, developed the growth model for every Nevada school to use and replace the federal program No Child Left Behind. A similar tool, the School Performance Framework, has been developed by the district to rank schools by their performance and will be released in four weeks.
Within 30 days, high-performing schools identified in these systems will be given autonomy, meaning freedom from "unnecessary bureaucracy" to operate independently and self-governed, providing lessons for other schools, Jones said.
In this same spirit of avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy, Jones has reduced the central office administration budget by 20 percent.
Jones also is pushing for more nontraditional curriculum, such as online courses through the district’s Virtual High School, which experienced a 37 percent increase in enrollment this year.
But none of that matters if the district doesn’t track students’ achievement to see whether improvement is real, not just anecdotal, he said.
"We will not do this by luck or chance, or randomly, but by design," he said, emphasizing that the School Board’s vision of a monumental shift takes hard work, not just tinkering. "This vision sets us on a long journey."
And the district must set measurable goals, cutting gaps in half for the academic achievement of racial and ethnic subgroups by 2016. Graduation rates must rise, and the number of high school students in Advanced Placement courses must also increase, he said.
The district also needs to track students after graduation, ensuring a yearly decline in the number who move on to college but are placed in high school-level courses.
To achieve all this, the district’s "biggest asset" is its teachers, Jones said.
But the relationship between teachers and the district has been fraught with tension since this summer. The district, struggling to balance its budget, has threatened to cut 1,000 teachers if their union, Clark County Education Association, doesn’t agree to a pay freeze.
Many teachers have asserted at School Board meetings that classrooms are in chaos as teachers work with the gnawing reminder that they could be jobless any day now. With contract negotiations at an impasse, the decision is up to an arbitrator.
Jones pledged to work for a contract with teachers that "values their hard work," but he didn’t clarify how that would be done, which is the million-dollar question as neither side will budge from their positions.
No matter what, community involvement is key for change, he said, mentioning the new "Get Involved — Watch Us Grow" link on the district’s website at www.ccsd.net for parents to offer their help.
"Some of our most challenging work lies ahead," he said. "It’s up to us. We’re going to succeed of fail as a community."
Carolyn Edwards, School Board president last year, praised Jones for his transparency with the community and not shying from making major changes.
"Superintendent Jones has gone beyond my largest hope," Edwards said.
Contact reporter Trevon Milliard at tmilliard@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0279.
