EDITORIAL: School construction

One education tax question is enough for November’s ballot. The Clark County School Board decided as much Wednesday when it voted unanimously to wait until at least 2016 before asking voters to authorize construction funding that’s badly needed today.

In fact, the school district’s need for new and renovated campuses far exceeds its need for new operational revenue. Elementary schools, especially, are well over capacity, and record enrollment is expected to grow enough to justify the construction of about 20 new campuses by 2018. However, because trustees will wait two more years to seek a 10-year extension of a construction bond passed in 1998, the soonest the district could open a new, traditionally funded campus is 2020.

That leaves the deeply flawed, business-crushing margins tax, placed on the fall ballot by the state teachers union, as the lone school funding issue before voters, thus creating a new argument against the question: Every single achievement initiative supported by the Nevada Legislature’s majority Democrats and under development within the Clark County School District — presumably to be funded by margins tax revenues — requires additional classrooms. Without that space, the district can’t hire more teachers to reduce class sizes, can’t expand full-day kindergarten, can’t expand pre-kindergarten and can’t create new English Language Learner “zoom schools.” (Whether any of these programs would lift student achievement over the long term is another question entirely.)

Unless, of course, the School Board embraces extreme, unpopular measures to address elementary school crowding, such as more year-round schools and double sessions at many campuses, creating two school “days” every day. The attendance boundaries for every single school could be redrawn.

That’s decidedly uncreative thinking that’s designed more to inflict pain — and thus pressure voters into supporting a bond extension through inconvenience — than to solve the school district’s problems. Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky was correct when he said the school district would have to “think outside the box” to manage its lack of elementary school space in the years ahead. One of his ideas, moving some fifth-grade classrooms to middle schools that aren’t at capacity, is especially good.

But we’re still waiting for the School Board to step forward and begin a dialogue on other options. Adding hundreds more portable classrooms isn’t cheap. Why not explore converting and renting an existing office building? Why not explore having a private developer front the costs to purchase land, build a new campus and allow the school district to lease it with an option to buy? At this point, there’s no harm in engaging the business community and seeking proposals. Charter schools are forced to consider every option for classroom space. Why shouldn’t the school district? And the school district still doesn’t have a plan to address its growing maintenance backlog.

Next year, Gov. Brian Sandoval and state lawmakers might need to inject some “one-shot” money into the school district for construction and maintenance, as well as enact friendlier charter school laws to take some enrollment pressure off the system. Exempting schools from the state’s burdensome prevailing wage law — if not repealing the statute outright — would save millions of dollars on campus construction projects.

It’s time for big ideas. We’re waiting.