Thursday, February 13, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Cover story: A matter of class

A low-income school and an upscale one are a study in contrasts

By Andrew Kiraly

Darry Dickman's classroom is a charming wreck. Relegated to a portable at the far end of the blacktop, the room is cluttered with papers, maps, banners and posters; toys are scattered and desks set awry by the high-energy resource room kids he teaches in his bumptious, big-brother style. It's just after recess, and Dickman is gearing up to teach his young charges subtraction--as soon as he locates his book.

"Carlos, where'd you hide my book?" he says. He rifles through desks, looks under tables, until Carlos darts in and tugs the tome from the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet standing in front of a Purdue Boilermakers banner.

Good thing. It's the only math book Dickman's got. Meanwhile, his 13 students rely on photocopies of select pages of whatever the topic of the day is; at $28 a pop, the books, part of the Saxon Math series for the learning disabled, are out of reach of the elementary school's ever-stretching budget.

"It's a really good series, because it comes with a supplement that focuses on practice and enrichment," says Dickman, an intermediate resource room teacher at J.T. McWilliams Elementary School. He then segues into a line that might be the mantra of many an instructor: "I work with what I got, and it ain't squat."

It's funny, but it's no joke. The bookshelves in his classroom are well-stocked with Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary books, board games--most of which Dickman bought at garage sales. Dickman has a decent computer, but no Internet. That's supplemented straight out of the '80s by two Apple IIes. Yeah, the ones with the 5 1/4-inch floppy drives.

"The kids know exactly where the books and games come from," Dickman says. "Every time I tell them I'm going garage-saling, they're all, 'Can you look for this book or that game?' These kids don't have much, but they've got big hearts. So I try to get them extra stuff, even if it isn't in my job description." He figures he spends about $800 a year on classroom extras, from yard-sale books and games to "manipulatives" (things such as plastic counting blocks that help the learning process).

Meanwhile, across town in Summerlin at Ethel Winternheimer-Staton Elementary School, James Hollowood's resource room is orderly and well-lighted. The shelves burgeon with workbooks--grades two and three get two each, in fact. The room has three computers and two printers. Hollowood, a 31-year veteran of the school district, is grateful.

"Special education is very expensive and generally not funded properly in the first place," Hollowood says. "There's so much that's wrong with education, but being here reminds me there's so much that's right. I feel sorry for the schools that aren't like this."

Across the class divide

J.T. McWilliams is a low-income school. Ethel W. Staton is a high-income school.

J.T. McWilliams, near Washington Avenue and Decatur Boulevard, is bounded by rundown homes and cheap apartments. The school opened in 1961; its student body is 57 percent Hispanic and 67 percent low-income, according to the school's profile on the Clark County School District website. Ethel W. Staton, meanwhile, is ensconced in the pastel folds of Summerlin, bounded by subdivisions with names that sound like hiking trails or expensive shoe stores. Opened in 2001, the campus hosts a population that is 68 percent white, with only 11 percent low-income students. J.T. McWilliams doesn't have a PTA chapter or a PTO (a self-contained parent-teacher organization independent of the national Parent Teacher Association). By contrast, Ethel W. Staton hosts one of the district's most aggressive PTOs.

Rich school, poor school. Old school, new school. Is there really that much of a difference?

"There's certainly the perception that newer schools are better off than older schools, and there's some validity to it in terms of infrastructure," says Walt Rulffes, the district's deputy superintendent. "But it's not true for the instructional end of things. New schools get no more money than older schools."

But there are differences. Take a day spent at Ethel W. Staton and compare it to one spent at J.T. McWilliams, and the differences are as unmistakable as the sound of the recess bell. Between extra district and federal money pumped into it, aggressive grant-writing by administration and a dependable set of annual fundraisers, J.T. McWilliams does an admirable job of--to invoke Dickman's mantra--working with what it's got. But many of the inequities seem built-in. A handful of observations:

¥ Schools built since the '80s have computers and books included as part of their original equipment, thanks largely to the advent of bond issues that began then. Older schools have to stock and refurbish their libraries with their $7-per-student allocation. For computers, older schools rely on a district "refreshment program" that replaces outdated systems with newer ones. McWilliams received 45 computers; Staton started off with 136.

¥ Ethel W. Staton's PTO--which raised more than $35,000 last year and expects to break that record this year--is so active because, well, it can afford to be. The tireless corps of soccer moms who run the school's PTO largely are mothers from single-income families in which Daddy is the breadwinner. The women have a luxury that low-income families don't: time to organize fundraisers, time to spend in the classroom.

¥ The Staton PTO's fundraisers haul in more money not only because they're a PTO, but because they can sell pricier items for fundraisers--and their "customers" can afford them. You won't see four rounds of golf auctioned off among the McWilliams parents--an item on the Staton fundraiser roster.

¥ Many teachers and administrators note that higher-income schools draw more applicants; thus they have first pick, presumably from the best teachers.

¥ Anecdotally, the altruistic phenom of teachers reaching for their own checkbooks to pay for things the district can't/won't cover is universal. Some teachers at both McWilliams and Staton say they can spend upwards of $1,000 a year for classroom extras or essentials--from pencils to counting blocks to wall charts. The difference: Anecdotally, the teachers at Staton are buying more extras than essentials, and they report being reimbursed more often.

'You make do'

J.T. McWilliams is tucked in a neighborhood near Washington and Decatur where Spanish is the area language and the strip malls tend to host bars and auto repair shops. The 41-year-old school is currently in the middle of a renaissance of sorts. In 2000, the school scored 45 PCs as part of the district's refreshment program (though a few old Apple IIes rear their dusty heads here and there). A building grant allowed them to add a new building to the campus that now hosts the music room, P.E. room, computer lab and art room, among others. Aggressive grant-writing by Principal Phyllis Meckley has landed the school a hefty share of federal and state money; her most recent coup was a $500,000 Nevada Reading Excellence Act grant that went toward the purchase of new library books.

But the school's not doing as well as it might, mostly because of the low-income blues. McWilliams has no PTA or PTO. Extra money is raised by three office staffers who set up fundraisers in their spare time, garnering, tops, about $10,000 a year peddling the usual suspects such as cookie dough, Christmas ornaments and wrapping paper, and candy. The school, with a student population of about 800, was eligible for a federal Title I grant along with 116 other district schools, but the fund ran dry after being applied to the 51 poorest schools in the district. McWilliams ranked 69 on the list. The grant would have showered them with $350 per student, or about $280,000.

So why no PTA?

"It just died due to lack of interest, lack of involvement," Meckley says. "Every once in a while I'll get one or two parents who ask, 'Why isn't there a PTA? If there are enough parents interested, I'll do it.' Then they do the research, see the work involved and lose interest. But I think even though we don't have a PTA or a PTO, we're in pretty good shape."

That $10K goes toward extras that, one way or another, fall through budgeting cracks: maps and globes, reimbursements (if only token amounts) for teachers who buy extras, computer software. Still out of reach: 200 dictionaries for the classrooms, and--Meckley's holy grail--the new Harcourt Trophy reading series for grades one and two. The school ran out of money after buying the series for third, fourth and fifth grade. "It'll cost us $20,000 just to put it into first grade," Meckley says.

That piecemeal approach marks any principal's tack in these dark days of the ailing state budget, but more so with low-income schools that can't rely as much on private money flowing in through the PTA.

"You learn to make do with what you have," Meckley says. "You become comfortable and expert at juggling resources to fill in the gaps." For instance, will it be tapes for the listening center or computer carts? "But," she says, "I don't think of it in terms of need."

The cost of being poor

Ironically, the boost the low-income school receives from various programs actually ends up costing it more. Computers were provided by the district's refreshment program, for instance, but software wasn't--another dip into fundraising money. And while the "solid" number for the student body is 800, in any given year, the school actually sees about 1,200 students, says Meckley, thanks to a 40 percent transiency rate. Money escapes through that revolving door.

"Withdrawals and transfers are expensive," Meckley says. "There are textbooks we never see again, library books never returned, pencils and tablets that disappear." Yet another cost to bite into the school's annual baseline budget of about $5,600.

The library, housed in what was a year ago the lunchroom, hosts about 10,000 books, according to librarian Marilyn Lehnert. The room also hosts seven computers, a media room for teachers and about 350 videos.

Not bad for a 41-year run. The catch is that many of those books are old or outdated. The two annual book fairs bring in a total of about $600 a year, but that's not enough to keep up with weeding out the outdated and worn-out, replacing titles that disappear thanks to the turnover rate, and keeping a healthy stock of titles in Spanish.

"Our best-represented field is science," says Lehnert. "But what we need most is more reference material."

To put it charitably, the reference section is modest. The metal shelves on the east wall--which have plenty of space for new volumes--include as its core the World Book Millennium Edition Encyclopedia, the World Book Student Discovery Encyclopedia 2000 edition, the 1994 edition World Book and a 1997 Rand McNally classroom atlas.

The library at Staton, meanwhile, has about triple the resources in terms of reference.

It's partially because of a change in the way new schools are funded. It wasn't until the 1980s that the school district began funding libraries and providing computers as "original equipage"; before that, new libraries were much on their own, having to build collections with fundraisers and per-pupil money. That's why, just a year after opening, Ethel W. Staton already has a collection that's 9,000 strong--and promises to grow.

"Schools that have been around a long time, like J.T. McWilliams, have collections that still include titles from the '50s and '60s, and the librarian has to work with the funding given to them," says Stan Fuke, the district's library coordinator.

New schools get 1 1/2 percent of the school's construction cost to purchase new books.

"They can put in close to 8,000 titles in a new library," Fuke says. "Meanwhile, some of the older schools fall through the cracks. It doesn't seem quite equitable."

Meanwhile, the classrooms offer a study in creative wallet-stretching. Jennifer Binkley, a kindergarten teacher who focuses on physically disabled and developmentally delayed children, spends much of her time writing grants--when not opening her own pocketbook to the tune of $600 a year--for extras such as clay, books, snacks and counting cubes.

The custodian comes in and drops off a box of printer paper with a whump. Between the photocopies and print-on-demand workbooks, how long will that last?

"It'll be close," she says. "I might have to buy a stack myself. Or beg and borrow."

It's not a complaint, just a statement of fact. And that goes for the majority of the teachers at J.T. McWilliams. Many hail from worse schools (before here, Binkley taught in Indiana, where salary caps and budget freezes made her job twice as challenging), others just cope. Art teacher Darcey Baker's kiln is broken; kindergarten teacher Janet Whitmore has a broken computer and a shortage of outlets in her old classroom.

"Overall, though, I'm pretty content," says Whitmore, who's been at the school since 1993. "If you don't have it, you don't miss it. And if you really need it, you improvise. There was a PTA when I first came here, and the difference was there was a lot more community involvement. I think it would help a lot more if they got one started again. It just takes the right parents to run it."

The money machine

Those "right parents" are at Staton. They've got money, time and connections.

Buoyed by a biz-savvy brigade of energetic soccer moms, Staton is a dream school. It's no overstatement. As smoothly and cheerfully as the morning-bell ritual goes, you half-expect the kids and teachers to break into choreographed show tunes. As Principal Mark Christensen makes the rounds on a recent morning, kids are sneaking out of line to give "Mr. C" hugs and high-fives, or exchange ribbings about the Super Bowl. Moms--not teachers, just moms--trot through the halls where the doors are decorated with country-kitsch name markers bought by the PTO.

"We get a lot of stay-at-home moms who help out the school immensely," Christensen says. "They've got a great advantage [in the PTO], because so many of them either are or were professionals. So they come in ready to go. They understand that the dynamics of a PTO are much like running a small business."

That becomes clear during a conversation with PTO president Jeannine Harper in the school's bright, high-ceilinged library. The epitome of parental involvement, she lives right across the street, and two of her sons attend Staton, which has a student body of about 750. Toting a three-ring binder brimming with PTO info, Harper is hardly a stay-at-home mom. Rather, she spends her days whipping up fundraisers, popping in and out of Staton and--the buzzword of this latter-day PTO--networking. A list of their contributions, culled from the $35,000 they raised last year: maps and globes in every room, teacher name plaques ("for more spirit," Harper says), a die-cut machine to make lettering, "spirit wear" (that is, school spirit T-shirts for their "Red Wednesdays"), and welcome packages for new students. They started up the school's Take Dad to School Day, the art fair and helped kick off the school's Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program. They even dabbled in traffic engineering, reconfiguring the school's parking lot to make it more pedestrian-friendly. This year, they anticipate raising $38,000, and plan to put a chunk of the money toward the library's Advanced Reading Program, a pricey software suite that encourages kids to crack open books.

"There's only so much that district money can do," says Harper, a former buyer for a golf shop. "That's why every school should have a PTA or a PTO. I can't imagine not having one."

Mind you, this isn't the parent organization of yesteryear that breaks out the banquet tables for the annual bake sale. Rather, this modernized PTO relies as much on corporate connections as old-school fundraisers. Thirty percent of the PTO's budget comes from a program called E-script. It involves making point-of-sale donations to the PTO with everyday purchases. Through partnerships with companies such as Domino's, Vons, Target, Payless and Wendy's, the PTO has arranged it so member parents can direct a percentage of their charge to the PTO. It's no-muss, no-fuss fundraising.

"That was the thing that made us try E-script," says PTO vice president of programs Brandy Andrews. "We didn't want to inundate parents with regular fundraisers, and those can get intense to put on all the time."

But those parents don't seem to mind spending money; the school hosts yet other fundraising cells that also seem to be cash-magnets. The student council, for instance, raised $5,000 last year, money that in part went toward computer software programs such as PowerPoint.

The library, too, raises much of its own money. Librarian Kelly Clinton says the semiannual book fair rakes in about $3,000; and the "science store" they set up last month brought in $1,100. Perhaps it explains why the school's reference section is a veritable Library of Congress compared to the one at McWilliams. Staton's library has most of McWilliams' reference materials and the World Book 2001 Edition, the New Book of Knowledge 2000, the World Book Dictionary, the Children's Dictionary, the Heinemann First Encyclopedia, the New Grolier Children's Encyclopedia, a set of Young Scientist, Library of the Oceans, Age of the Dinosaurs and Amazing Animals of the World. The five iMacs--supplemented by four printers--have all the basics that McWilliams' computers do, plus Movieworks Deluxe, Kid Pix Deluxe 3, Hyperstudio, iMovie and more. The only out-of-date thing in the Staton library is the antique Cadena Philco record player on display.

The same educational wealth can be found in the classrooms, which teem with posters, charts and the usual array of construction-paper cut-outs.

"I kind of feel I'm at some super-deluxe school," says third-grade teacher Pauline Jorgensen. Like most of the teachers, she's sometimes treated to $100 gift certificates to Learning Is Fun--courtesy of the PTO. "They're items I'd normally end up buying myself, like games, balance scales, novel sets."

Next door, fellow third-grade teacher Robin Schumacher likens the school to the educational equivalent of "[L.A.'s Century] Plaza Hotel. The frog habitat I was able to buy, thanks to them, really enriched my science curriculum. It makes my life a whole lot easier. The PTO is just outstanding."

The pocket charts for the kids--courtesy of the PTO. The mini-dry-erase boards--courtesy of the PTO. Schumacher says she still dips into her own pocketbook, but it's for extras, not essentials. And she says that a good PTO or PTA isn't solely about the parents' salaries--it's about character and commitment.

"Parents make all the difference," says Schumacher. She points out that one of the organization's most important functions has nothing to do with money: PTO members regularly come in to help with photocopies or collating, which frees her up to teach. "Less paperwork for me means I can focus more on creative things to do with the kids. I still take work home, but it's nice to have that support."

The culture factor

And if it is, in the end, about parents, what's stopping the parents at McWilliams from starting up a PTA or PTO? In one sense, such an organization can seem like a luxury to households in which both parents work. But others say cultural differences may play a part. Staton librarian Mary Ellen DesChamps says many Hispanic families in lower-income areas--such as around McWilliams--come from comparatively impoverished Mexico. They don't see lack at McWilliams; they see bounty.

"If you're coming from Mexico, even a low-income school in the U.S. is heaven," says DesChamps, who is Hispanic. She adds that a cultural respect for la maestra (the teacher) tends to mean that asking for improvements might be construed as a sign of disrespect--despite the high value they place on learning. DesChamps has seen it firsthand--at lower-income schools she's taught at such as Paul Culley and Rose Warren--and in her own family. "My mom always felt embarrassed because she had only a sixth-grade education, but my dad instilled in me the importance of learning. The Hispanic population has to learn to ask for more from their schools."

Judging from the results at Staton, they'd have everything to gain. It's true a low-income school PTO or PTA may not have the fundraising muscle of their counterpart here in the sculpted suburban hills of Summerlin, but it's as much about the intangibles as the material perks.

A low-income school's PTA may not score a schoolwide software suite or individual dry-erase boards for the kids, but they certainly could help with a DARE program, like that in Staton's multipurpose room on a recent Friday. The room is packed with DARE-shirted students, moms and dads toting cameras and camcorders. The cop giving the presentation jokes that he'll keep his presentation short, because he knows "you all want to get to those delicious cookies and punch back there."

Indeed, the banquet table in the back is stocked with chocolate chip cookies as thick as hockey pucks. Of course, they're courtesy of the PTO.