Las Vegas Sun

By Emily Richmond

Sun, May 17, 2009 (2 a.m.)

In 1986, Carolyn Goodman led a small caravan out to Summerlin to take a look at the donated parcel of land that would become the Meadows School’s new home.

The school, launched in 1984 with a portable building on the site of a former car dealership, was the first tenant in the master-planned community.

“We drove around for hours, looking for the little red flag in the ground,” recalls Goodman, the school’s founder and president. “It was just us, and 25,000 empty acres.”

With the Meadows now celebrating its 25th anniversary, Summerlin is a lot more crowded, and no one has any trouble finding the elite private school.

In fact, visitors are so common to the Scholar Lane campus that Goodman has implemented a few timesaving techniques that minimize the disruption that frequent tours might bring.

The educators who visit are particularly interested in the Meadows accelerated reading program, which starts in preschool. Outside each classroom in the lower school, there’s a small sign listing how many students in the room are reading at the various grade levels. Outside one kindergarten classroom, the sign indicated that five students were reading at a first-grade level, eight were at the second-grade level and seven were at the third-grade level.

Goodman said she welcomes the scrutiny, whether it’s from out-of-town educators, business leaders or families interested in enrolling their children.

“That’s the thing about Vegas,” said Goodman, wife of Mayor Oscar Goodman. “You can advertise anything. We deliver.”

•••

At the start of last week, the district needed to find jobs for 142 teachers who were left without assignments after the traditional April “transfer season.”

By Thursday, all but 28 had new positions.

The 28 in the “surplus” pool include 15 who taught elective career classes, six half-day kindergarten teachers, four speech/drama teachers and one Russian language teacher.

Martha Tittle, the district’s human resources chief, said the next step would be to determine whether there are other teachers with less seniority in comparable positions. If that’s the case, the teachers currently in the job could be bumped to make room for the employee in the surplus pool.

The district currently has about 400 licensed personnel vacancies for the 2009-10 academic year, most in high-need and hard-to-fill areas. However, the number of teachers who quit or retire over the summer, as well as how many new students show up for school in the fall, will determine whether the district has to lay off any teachers.

Ruben Murillo, president of the Clark County Education Association, said the teachers union is predicting fewer retirements than in previous years. Many school districts nationwide are firing, not hiring, Murillo said, which means less opportunity for Clark County teachers who might have been planning to jump ship. And with 401(k) and retirement accounts significantly down in value, as well as homes, many teachers can’t afford to stop working, Murillo said.

“It’s unfortunate this is happening,” said Murillo, noting that nearly 700 support employees are also being laid off. “If Nevada had a stable tax base to support public education, we wouldn’t be going through this.”

•••

When asked to comment on the Nevada Policy Research Institute’s proposed “Freedom Budget,” which outlined a blueprint for balancing the state’s spending plan without raising taxes — one high-ranking education official politely declined.

“I have to deal with the real budget that’s actually on my desk right now,” the education official told the Sun. “I don’t have time for a trip to Fantasyland.”

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