Thursday, August 07, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Cover Story: Do the math

$836 million sounds like a lot, but it's just enough to keep the school system afloat

By Andrew Kiraly

Another bout of freaky weather is taking shape outside Carlos Garcia's window. On this Friday afternoon, clustered fists of gray clouds send down a stingy, wind-blown drizzle on the Clark County School District headquarters parking lot. The usual chitchat about the weather ensues, and the opinion is unanimous: It's lame.

"I don't mind the recent weather, but when the clouds hang over like that and nothing really happens, I wish it would just rain already," the superintendent of the Clark County School District says. "It's like, 'Come on already!'"

Formidable-looking clouds that don't quite deliver: not a bad metaphor for the funding CCSD received when the $836 million tax increase was passed by the state Legislature on July 22. The school district's portion of the biggest tax increase in state history is an almost 34 percent increase over the last biennium, but--at the risk of offending Nevada's mustachioed Libertarian contingent--Garcia says it's not enough.

"Everybody thinks we suddenly got all this money, and now that we have all these resources, we better expect higher student achievement," Garcia says. "Well, we're certainly grateful for it, but this is a bread-and-water budget, not a Cadillac budget."

Garcia says a lot of things on this drizzly Friday, more than two weeks after CCSD and 16 other school districts in the state--the last in line at the budget party--finally got their money. But the point that comes through like a lightning bolt is that even a $836 million tax hike is no way to treat what district honchos say is the fastest-growing school district in the nation, and the sixth largest. The prevailing mindset is the school district got its loot, so the so-called alarmist educrats should just chill and go home. After all, the district's Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program was spared the chopping block; the literacy specialists still have a place to hang their hats. That's what all the fuss was about, right?

Well, that and so much more. While those higher-profile programs will come on line--for at least two more years, anyway--the education budget has more blind spots than an 80-year-old on U.S. 95. It's not the most popular position to take after a record tax increase, but Garcia--who says he sometimes has bad dreams about wandering through shiny, new empty schools he can't afford to staff--argues that the district needs more. Critics kindly be damned.

"Everybody thinks they're an expert in education because everyone went through it," he says. "But it's expensive to educate people. That's what people forget."

Hits and misses

In response to a 2001 call by Gov. Kenny Guinn to lay out the fundamental needs of education in our state, Garcia and 16 other superintendents put their heads together to discuss what basics the school district could really use. The resulting report--what Garcia calls a "Russian novel"--sported a cute acronym, iNVest (Investing in Nevada's Education, Students and Teachers), but the cuteness stops there. This is a bare-bones, 15-item wish list that outlines areas where the district desperately needs to catch up. Price tag: $876 million.

The iNVest plan serves as a nice jumping-off point to compare what they wanted and what they got this funding cycle. CCSD did get an extra $38 million for books, supplies and equipment; was able to continue $2,000 signing bonuses for new teachers; scored money to cover the cost of a rate increase in the state's public employee retirement fund; got funds to cover inflationary increases in utility costs; and--the sour cherry on top--garnered teachers a 2 percent annual salary increase.

The party ends there. Other iNVest needs--many of them symptoms of an explosively growing school district that opens a new school a month and serves more than a quarter-million students--the school district will have to do without. Here's where the wish list becomes something more like a miss list:

¥ No free summer school. Parents, did your kid fall behind in high school? Does he need to catch up in order to graduate on time? Does he have to retake a class he flubbed the first time around? Or does he just have a crazed desire to enrich himself? Unless he qualifies for a federal scholarship, it'll cost $90 a credit. It would be great if "we could have free summer school and use that as a remediation program," says Clark County School Board President Sheila Moulton. "But if you charge for it, it becomes impossible" for some to afford it. Cost: $14 million. Funding: $0.

¥ No full-day kindergarten for at-risk students. According to the iNVest plan, full-day kindergarten boasts a number of benefits over a half-day schedule, including a reduction in the number of kids placed in special ed classes and closing achievement gaps between population groups. Cost: $15 million. Funding: $0.

¥ No 5 percent pay increase for teachers. Teachers did score a 2 percent raise for each year of the biennium, which lags behind the anticipated 3 percent cost-of-living adjustment for 2004-2005--and caps a three-year period prior when teachers got no raises. Fun fact: Guinn says it'll likely be another six to eight years before teachers get another raise. "You can't get the best teachers if you can't pay them enough," says Deputy Superintendent Augi Orci. Cost: $268 million. Funding: $102 million.

¥ No money for English Language Learner programs. At the top of the list is the district's ELL program, which tries to get the district's 45,000 non-English-speaking kids on track within three years. It might sound like a luxury, but district heads insist the program, required by law, is crucial for handling Southern Nevada's burgeoning diversity and curbing the dropout rate.

"We have kids from more than 40 different language backgrounds who need some sort of assistance," says Orci. "Most people think, 'It's those Hispanic kids,' or that it's illegal immigrants, but that's not necessarily true. The price that society pays for not funding these kids is pretty high. If we don't teach them English literacy, they become more likely dropout candidates, and they may end up" drifting into criminal activity.

"Our fastest-growing segment is ELL students," says Garcia. "In most states, the state provides you with additional resources to be able to hire people who can deal with kids who don't speak English so we can get them to learn English as quickly as possible, instead of just throwing them into a regular classroom. In this state, we don't get any additional resources, so how are you supposed to do that? Once again, you suck it up in class size." Cost: $77 million. Funding: $0.

Size matters

Class size is the sacrificial lamb of the dreary school budgeting ritual. When money's tight--which is, like, always--futzing with class size yields the most savings--at a possibly high educational cost. Garcia says some high school classes have as many as 40 students per teacher, while the ideal is somewhere around 30. He also points out that decreasing the teacher-student ratio districtwide by one--from 1:40 to 1:39, for instance--costs about $10 million.

"When you have to make cuts, where else are you going to generate that amount of money?" he says. "When we had to make $97 million in cuts over the past 2 1/2 years, it was easier to say, 'Well, we're going to absorb as much as $40 million by increasing class sizes.' We're going back to [decrease class sizes in] third grade because we asked for a couple waivers to decrease a couple students per class. Just to go back and do that is going to cost us 100 teachers. Our class sizes are huge. There are only five states that have larger class sizes than we do."

But if there is such a thing as an attractive budget cut, class size is the place for it; its benefit and curse is that it's not very visible. "The sad thing is that parents, especially parents of secondary students [because they don't visit classrooms as often], don't see it," Garcia says. "Most secondary kids don't come home and say, 'Gee, Mom and Dad, our classroom's like Woodstock.' I think what hinders us most is we do so well with so little that a lot of the problems aren't visible."

Lagging in second place is per-pupil spending. It went up a few hundred bucks this biennium, but it still trails behind the national average of $6,400 per pupil. CCSD's per-pupil allocation is about $5,000.

"Per-pupil spending has gone up [with this budget]," says Moulton, "But what people forget is that inflation has gone up, too. I'm grateful we have [the budget] in place at this moment. But I'm still not satisfied. We need to get up to the national average."

Says Garcia: "If you're below the national average by $1,400, imagine what you could do with $1,400. When you multiply that by 265,000 students, that's big, serious money [$371 million, to be exact]."

The final tug of the belt is a host of cuts and stretches. Official district vehicles will head to the garage for long-term parking as employees will take their own vehicles and receive a stipend for mileage. Cell phones will be hung up. Custodians will sweep and mop an ever-growing area; Garcia says CCSD custodians clean an average of 32,000 square feet compared with the regional average of 16,000 square feet. And two repairmen will be in charge of fixing the entire school district's musical instruments--the same number of repairmen the district had 20 years ago.

"Those are the types of things the public doesn't see," Garcia says. "The infrastructure is beginning to collapse now because we cannot maintain the facilities at the standard they need to be, and in the long run that's a bigger cost."

Class action

But amid the expected kvetching about budget woes, the cloud--even if it doesn't follow up on its promise of rain--does have a silver lining: a new statewide vibe of unity among district bosses prompted by hammering out the iNVest plan. "The entire educational system spoke with one voice, and that's a major first," Garcia says. "The iNVest plan is the first time ever in state history that the superintendents stood together instead of going their separate ways. We're going to continue that."

In light of the infamous legislative impasse--an event that pundits and politicos alike say revealed new wrinkles of anti-tax, anti-government hostility--that unified front isn't a luxury, it's a necessity.

"I suppose that ultra-conservative, anti-tax position that doesn't see government playing a significant role in anything is okay if you're not growing and don't have a lot of social problems," says Orci. "But in a society where growth is explosive, with the fastest-growing school district in the nation, those services have to be paid for. Nevada is at the bottom of nearly every conceivable list that has anything to do with education or well-being of children, and it's a true embarrassment for a state that has the wherewithal to fund these things at a higher level."

Heidi Walters contributed to this story.