Friday, April 17, 1998 | 10:30 a.m.
The Clark County School District has begun adding 391 classrooms to schools, but not all of them will help ease crowding in the fast-growing district.
Some of the new rooms will merely replace about 40 makeshift classrooms that have sprung up inside 11 schools and are now being torn out because they are a potential fire trap.
"Is there an eminent danger? No," district facilities manager David Broxterman said. "But for that one in a million chance, we don't want to say I knew about something ahead of time and we didn't correct it."
Earlier this month the district started its largest classroom additions project ever, mostly to add space in crowded buildings.
In the next three years, the district will spend one-fourth of its 1996 school bond money -- about $155 million -- constructing new classrooms at 96 schools, many in separate buildings on the school campuses.
The district, the nation's ninth largest and fastest growing with nearly 200,000 students, has been struggling for years to keep up with the explosive growth. District officials out stumping to convince voters to approve multimillion-dollar school bonds say new schools and new classrooms that ease crowding are essential to quality education.
But the first phase of the current classroom additions project will target 11 elementary schools where new classrooms will add limited new space.
"We lose some rooms, we get some new rooms," Harmon principal Tony Ulintz said. "It's pretty well a wash. We're not necessarily creating more rooms for growth. It's to make up for the room we're losing."
The first 11 schools to get classroom additions, nearly identical in design, are called "abc" schools because of a distinctive abc-mural on their exterior. They are Diskin, Dondero, Edwards, Ferron, Harmon, Harris, Smith, Tate, Tomiyasu, Ward and Wengert elementary schools.
The schools were built with two interior "great rooms," essentially big classrooms.
School officials said the great rooms emerged when the schools were built between 1970 and 1976, when many teachers and education experts were experimenting with a classroom "grouping" concept. The concept called for larger classrooms with more students.
"The idea was one classroom and one class of students would listen to another one and they would all get smarter," Broxterman said. "It ended up being chaos."
So over the years, principals at most of the 11 schools have erected temporary walls inside the great rooms, in most cases creating four smaller classrooms and several tiny offices.
At Wengert Elementary, art teacher David Meyer teaches in one of the temporary rooms, a cramped, L-shaped class where as many as 38 kids crowd inside to work on clay and paper projects. One day last week, first graders clamored awkwardly around the room, pasting together construction-paper flowers.
"Our seating arrangement is really squished," Meyer said. "It's like a log jam that makes it hard to move around."
But the real problem, district and fire officials now say: the rooms violate current fire codes, which mandate that children should be able to exit a room into a corridor that leads outside.
"If they have sub-divided those areas, then they have to go back and address the safety issues," acting assistant state fire marshal Martin Lucas said.
District officials down play the danger to students. But they plan to tear down the classroom walls anyway to comply with code, leaving the great rooms as they were originally built.
"I wouldn't think twice about my child being safe in those rooms," Broxterman said. "However, that doesn't make it code-wise. When you're dealing with children, you go 100 percent with code."
The temporary rooms were cheaply built -- about 40 rooms at the 11 schools cost roughly $16,000 to build over the years, planning and engineering director Dale Scheideman said.
Officials say the rooms do not represent a waste of tax money because teachers needed the rooms in the crowded schools. They also point out the rooms did not violate fire codes at the time they were erected.
"They probably wouldn't have added those classrooms if they had been overcrowded," Scheideman said. "Principals requested the modifications be made. They were allowed under the codes at the time."
Officials also said the great rooms will not be wasted.
"The great rooms are still usable space," Scheideman said. "We're not throwing away anything."
Several district critics said tearing out classrooms seemed like a waste.
"The district needs to assess what expertise they have on staff to make these kinds of decisions," said engineer and district watcher Louis Overstreet, who applied but did not get the highest facilities job in the district. "I have not seen the talent level in the district meet the challenges that are presented by a district of this size."
Several principals said they lamented the loss of classrooms to new fire codes, given their crowded conditions.
"You bet I would like to keep them," Wengert Elementary principal Scott Ober said. "That would mean less teacher roaming, less team teaching. But the fire department has said take them out, so we'll do it."
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