WEEKEND EDITION: March 16, 2003
Kevin Montoya, 12, has been assigned and reassigned to five schools in as many years -- all without his family ever moving from their Las Vegas home.
"It's easy to forget where you are sometimes," said Kevin, who is now a sixth grader at Silvestri Junior High School on Silverado Ranch Boulevard. "You have to make new friends and learn your way around, but I'm used to it by now."
His mother, Brenda Montoya, doesn't understand it. Kevin is a good student, but he has become a victim of the school system's overcrowding.
"In a normal world your school doesn't change unless your home address does," she said. "But we live in Clark County, and this is definitely not normal."
In a district where the last two years have brought more than 12,000 new pupils and 10 new schools each, the pressures of overwhelming growth have created a seemingly endless game of musical chairs.
Each year the Clark County School District shuffles some 20,000 of its 258,000 children to new schools in an effort to ease overcrowding.
Parents and educators say the constant rezoning, in which the School Board redraws attendance boundaries to ease overcrowding, is taking a toll on the quality of education and efforts to build a sense of community within schools.
Combining the number of students who are forced to change schools by the district and the students whose families move to another address during the school year, there are about 105,000 students on the move each year. That's 37 percent of the student population.
"We know it's disruptive to move a child, yet we continue to do it year after year," said Maria Meyerson, professor of curriculum and instruction at University of Nevada, Las Vegas' College of Education. "If we could find ways to keep children in one setting for a longer period of time it would go a long way toward solving a lot of the problems we see in student behavior and achievement."
Various studies have shown community-based schools -- where students, parents and teachers are vested partners -- have higher test scores and grade-point averages, fewer discipline problems and more motivated learners, Meyerson said.
Clark County campuses with the lowest scores on the latest round of proficiency exams also had significantly higher transiency rates, a review of district records showed.
Lynch-Edison Elementary School, which is in its second consecutive year on the state's list of campuses needing improvement, has a transiency rate of 48 percent, compared with the district average of 33 percent. The only Clark County high school on the list, Desert Pines, has a transiency rate of 44 percent.
Phil Arizola, a member of the Attendance Zone Advisory Commission, said that too often the constant boundary changes are used as an excuse to pass the buck.
"It's a convenient excuse for bad test scores or low grades," Arizola said. "We hear it over and over, 'Don't blame us, we don't get the students from start to finish, so it's not our fault.' "
While it may be a frequent refrain, that doesn't make it less true, said Agustin Orci, the school district's deputy superintendent of instruction.
"Some of our schools get new students on a daily basis," Orci said. "We have to help them not only catch up to the rest of the class, but also make up the basic skills they didn't learn at the last school they attended somewhere else."
The high transiency rate may be one of the strongest arguments against proposals to break up Clark County's schools into smaller, independent districts.
Students moving between schools in one district don't have to worry about differences in curriculum or graduation requirements. Many schools use the same textbooks as well.
"It's confusing enough to have a kid switch between three schools all within one year. Imagine if he was also switching between three districts," Orci said.
Brenda Montoya said each time Kevin is sent to a different school she worries about him falling through the cracks. The new teachers don't know her son's academic strengths and weaknesses, and can't easily ask his former teachers about him, she said.
The latest round of rezoning, completed last week, spared Kevin. But Silverstri's boundary lines are up for review next spring, which means he could be sent to a different middle school for his final year.
"He's an unknown quantity to them," Montoya said. "I would love to have him go through the same teachers his sister had, so at least there would be some sort of connection there."
But district officials say the idea -- while laudable -- isn't realistic given the tremendous growth in Clark County.
"It's a pain in the neck to get rezoned, we know that," said School Board member Susan Brager-Wellman, whose children and grandchildren have attended Clark County schools. "It's also something we all get hit with at some point. Do we enjoy interrupting a student's learning experience? Of course not. But it's a fact of life here."
Redrawing boundary lines isn't something anyone enjoys, said Dusty Dickens, school district director of zoning and demographics. In addition to finding classroom seats for children already in the area, the district must make long-term plans for neighborhoods that only exist on a map in the county's planning department.
Clark County isn't just the nation's fastest-growing school district. It's also a community where the current residents are also in a state of flux -- a third of Clark County's students move to at least one new address within the academic year, Dickens said.
That's more than 85,000 students who pack up one classroom desk and turn up at a new school needing a seat.
There's another factor: Some of those students move more than once, Dickens said. There are families who hop between neighborhoods, sometimes enrolling and re-enrolling their children in three or more schools in a single academic year. The district doesn't keep statistics on the number of students who transfer between schools, although administrators estimate it to be in the thousands.
Staff turnover is also high -- particularly for less-experienced teachers assigned to at-risk schools. But turnover also occurs in the suburbs, where teachers are lured to a school opening closer to home, or to work with an administrator who has been promoted to principal.
"It's best to have stability in the school environment for everyone involved," said Mary Ella Holloway, president of the Clark County Education Association, the union representing most of the teachers. "But the kind of growth we're experiencing here doesn't really support the concept of teachers or students staying in one place for very long."
As the district's growth accelerated in the mid-1990s, the School Board created the Attendance Zone Advisory Commission to give parents more say in the process. Made up of community volunteers, the commission holds public-input meetings, devise proposals and make recommendations to the board.
While public opinion is sought, it is ultimately the School Board that decides zoning changes. However, there are some opportunities for exemptions. Principals are allowed to issue waivers for various reasons, including protecting school diversity.
District officials may allow a child to stay in school if being moved causes a significant hardship -- such as a family being left without after-school child care. But as one angry father was told at a School Board meeting last spring, having his children rezoned from a nine-month calendar campus to a year-round school didn't meet the hardship standard just because they would miss out on a long-planned family vacation.
There's a direct relationship between developing a school community and improving student performance, said LeAnn Putney, an assistant professor of educational psychology at UNLV.
"Children don't learn in a vacuum," Putney said. "Academic achievement occurs when you foster a community of learners, where parents and students have made a commitment to the overall success of the school."
Several other large metropolitan areas are evaluating the benefits of such stability, Putney said. One option could be guaranteeing children will stay at the same school even if the family moves, with the district continuing to provide transportation within its boundaries, Putney said.
Given the Clark County School District's bleak fiscal outlook, such a program would be unlikely to win support, Putney said.
The district will have a struggle to provide enough buses for all of the children who demand different schools under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, Putney said. By law, the district must offer children transfers to more successful campuses if schools make the statewide "needing improvement" list for two consecutive years.
But district officials say their job is to create the best learning environment for all students, and sometimes that means disrupting the lives of a few to benefit the many.
"The question isn't whether your child should stay in one place, but where can he get the best classroom experience," School Board member Ruth Johnson said. "I believe a student is better off being rezoned to a less crowded school, even if it does mean a longer walk in the mornings or having to make new friends."
That's a tough argument to sell to parents such as Michael Woodfield.
Woodfield's 7-year-old son, Zachary, currently attends Rhodes Elementary School in the northwest region, less than two blocks from his home. But next fall Zachary will be rezoned to the new Bilbray Elementary School three miles away.
"My son should be riding his bike to Rhodes next year, not sitting on a bus that's driving past the school he should be attending," Woodfield said.
Darryl Wyatt, Rhodes principal, said the boundary lines had to be moved to ease overcrowding. Rhodes, built to serve 836 students as a year-round campus, currently has more than 1,000 children.
"When you're in an area as densely populated as this one, you're going to have to take some kids within walking distance and put them somewhere else," Wyatt said. "It's the only way we're going to get our school down to an optimal size."
Kerri Varwig knows the price of constantly changing schools, and she doesn't want her children to pay it.
Since moving to Green Valley six years ago, Varwig has watched anxiously as the boundary lines for the district's high schools have been drawn, redrawn and redrawn again -- each time changing the school where her three children would attend.
"First we were Basic, then Silverado opened," Varwig said. "After that they told us we were going to Foothill. Now we're Coronado, and I'm praying we stay Coronado, at least for the next two years when my oldest graduates."
Varwig, whose father's career took the family across the country, is determined to protect her children from the type of turmoil she experienced growing up.
"You don't connect with people, you don't make friends, you don't feel an attachment to the campus or extracurricular activities," said Varwig, who attended nine schools between first and 12th grade, including different high schools for her sophomore, junior and senior years. "From the beginning I've been adamant that my children will never go through that kind of stress."
But rezoning can have some benefits, said Jenn Dalrymple, a junior at Coronado High School. Dalrymple, who along with her parents successfully fought off a zoning change in 1999 that would have sent her to Foothill High School, said she was devastated two years ago to learn she would have to leave Green Valley High School at the end of her freshman year.
The rezoning was made all the more frustrating when Dalrymple learned none of her closest neighborhood friends would be forced to switch because they lived on the "right" side of Wigwam Parkway.
"I thought my life was over," Dalrymple said. "I didn't want to go to school in the morning, and my grades went down."
In the long-run the rezoning has turned out to be a positive factor, Dalrymple said.
"I had to face reality and make the best of it," she said. "I learned how to just put out my hand and introduce myself to as many people as possible, and figured out how to do better when I was on my own. I think I'm a more confident, friendly person now."
Another benefit is less rivalry between the two high schools, said Green Valley junior Suzanne Walton, a longtime friend and classmate of Dalrymple's.
"If Jenn wasn't there, I don't think we'd hang out with anyone from Coronado, or even pay much attention to them," Walton said. "When you have friends at another school there's more of a connection, and you're more interested."
School Board member Mary Beth Scow knows just what Dalrymple's and other families are experiencing.
Talking about what her own sons went through in 1992 brings Scow to tears.
When Green Valley High School opened that year, Scow's younger son was enrolled as a freshman. His older brother, a senior, stayed at Valley High School. Both boys played baseball, and played against each other three times during that season.
"My husband and I would sit on one team's side for half the time and the other team's side for the second half," Scow said. "It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do."
When the games ended and the teams lined up for the traditional hand slaps, the boys would wait at the end of the row and then hug, Scow said.
"It was extremely difficult but it was also very beautiful to watch them," Scow said, her voice choked with emotion. "They were showing everyone how much they loved each other no matter what uniform they were wearing."
While some zoning stories result in happy endings, Montoya says she worries about the message the constant reshuffling sends to the students.
"We're telling our children that education doesn't really matter, that we'll just move them whenever it make things more convenient for us," Montoya said. "Why should we expect kids to care about staying in school when we're moving them around like checkers?"
Join the Discussion:
Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.
Full comments policy