When Superintendent Jhone Ebert was chosen to lead the Clark County School District over a year ago, she inherited a district that was losing students at a rate it had never experienced before.
But Ebert told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that she sees the circumstances as an opportunity.
“We were always focused on building new schools and trying to seat children, and now, luckily, we’re in a different space,” Ebert said. “We actually are going to spend and go deep with the quality of our education system.”
The Review-Journal spoke with key school district department leaders to understand how the district is dealing with the effects of shrinking enrollment.
Ebert, at the helm of the district, laid out a three-pronged approach for navigating these shifting tides. This includes an operational efficiency study, set to release in June, to ensure the district’s dwindling dollars are spent wisely and a concerted effort to keep staff whose schools can’t fund their positions employed.
DISTRICT IN DECLINE
Further in the future, Ebert intends to work with the Nevada Legislature to raise the state’s per-pupil funding rate, she said, which currently sits at an adjusted base rate of $9,501 per Clark County student.
She attributed the district’s improved graduation rates and increase in students earning college- and career-ready diplomas to large increases to the per-pupil funding rate during the 2023 legislative session.
“Our kids are competing against children that have more resources, and every single time that we’ve been provided resources in education in the state of Nevada, we have improved outcomes,” Ebert said.
On staffing, district walks a fine line
RoAnn Triana oversees more than 44,000 employees as the chief human resources officer for the school district, one of the largest employers in Nevada.
She acknowledged that student enrollment decline means the district will need fewer employees to operate. But Triana is trying to downsize the district’s workforce without layoffs, saying she hopes end-of-year retirements and resignations open enough positions for staff whose jobs are in jeopardy.
In February, the district announced that more than 1,200 of its employees were at schools that did not have the funding required to keep their positions. The announcement started the surplus process, where affected employees can explore open positions at other schools and either take a new position or resign.
Our kids are competing against children that have more resources, and every single time that we’ve been provided resources in education in the state of Nevada, we have improved outcomes.
Ebert said in April that around 200 teachers had not yet been placed in a position for the upcoming school year. Triana previously said the district was “confident that we’re going to be able to place most, if not all, of them.”
In April, Triana was reluctant to state whether the district would meet its goal of no surplus employees.
“I don’t have a crystal ball, and I don’t like gambling,” she said. But she added that hitting the goal is “going to be close.”
“I would be foolish to think we’re not going to lose any because, truly, every year, we lose some,” Triana said.
As staff go through the surplus process, Triana said the district’s human resources department has improved its services for affected teachers.
Employees can meet one-on-one with a specialist to ask questions and find positions that fit their qualifications. The specialists also help employees identify credentials they can earn to be eligible for other jobs, she added.
“There is a lot of nervousness around (the surplus process), especially in this economy, and we want to do our part to really support people and be there for them,” Triana said.
For schools, placing function over form
The school district’s chief of facilities, Brandon McLaughlin, said the dip in enrollment gives the district a luxury it hasn’t had in decades: a chance to build schools optimized for learning.
“Throughout the ’90s, we were building for capacity first and foremost,” McLaughlin said. “That was the old strategy. It was just scramble, scramble, scramble to get seats anywhere we could put them.”
Now, McLaughlin said, district leaders are analyzing their schools to see how they can be redesigned to improve educational outcomes, through improvements like increased natural light in classrooms and more space for small group work in class.
But enrollment declines have left the school system facing a new math problem.
Unlike most district services, a school building’s size cannot scale down as enrollment shrinks. It’s one reason the preliminary facility master plan to optimize the district’s buildings lists campus closures as a possibility.
McLaughlin wouldn’t weigh in on the likelihood of school closures happening but said “it’s one of the options on the table for a reason.”
“The closing of schools is an efficient way to offload square footage, but that’s not the sole methodology of why we would do it, necessarily,” McLaughlin said.
He said CCSD also considers what academic opportunities and extracurricular activities would exist for students in depleted schools.
“We need to not just operate things the way we have,” McLaughlin said. “We need to be right-sizing our assets to match the enrollment that we have.”
Throughout the ’90s, we were building for capacity first and foremost. That was the old strategy. It was just scramble, scramble, scramble to get seats anywhere we could put them.
He added that closures aren’t the only way to reduce the district’s square footage. When the 150,000-square-foot Brinley Middle School was rebuilt, McLaughlin said, extraneous rooms were shrunk to lower operational costs while keeping its student capacity stable.
As the district makes its facility master plan, McLaughlin said he’s most excited about proposals to expand preschool programs at high schools and construct pre-K through eighth-grade schools.
The former kills two birds with one stone, McLaughlin said, by opening up more pre-K seats for families while offering opportunities for high schoolers to get experience as early childhood education teachers. The latter comes from increased demand by parents, he said.
“Parents love being able to drop off their seventh grader with their second grader. Why should we not want to be competitive with that?” McLaughlin said. “It is an effective way to deliver lots of curriculum and instruction in a very efficient footprint.”
Contact Spencer Levering at slevering@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0253.
