Thursday, April 30, 1998 | 10:24 a.m.
Silverado High School freshman Stephen Kunzer and 6,098 other students in several pockets of the county will be the first to attend one of three new high schools in fall 1999, the School Board voted Wednesday.
But Stephen's mother, Tina Kunzer-Murphy, would prefer he stay at Silverado, where he plays baseball.
"It's a distance issue and it's a comfort issue," Kunzer-Murphy, who lives closer to Silverado than the new school, said outside the board room. "My opinion was to give parents an option to choose where they want to go."
Despite Kunzer-Murphy's objections, Wednesday marked the least contentious zoning meeting ever, school officials said. The board approved attendance boundaries for the new schools with little discussion.
"It had to be some kind of a record," school district demographer Dusty Dickens said.
Zoning meetings typically last hours and draw dozens of parents upset about the school board redrawing attendance boundary lines, which often end up moving their children to other schools.
But only one parent spoke Wednesday and had only compliments for the board's 13-member committee that spent several months drawing attendance boundaries for the new schools.
"I understand this is a year-to-year thing," parent John Marino said. "This town is exploding and we have to address that every year."
The new schools, designed to hold 2,700 students each, are being built at Centennial Parkway and Hualapai Way in northwest Las Vegas; Washington Avenue and Sandhill Road in northeast Las Vegas; and Heather and College drives in Henderson.
The schools will open in fall 1999 with ninth-, 10th- and 11th-graders -- students now in seventh, eighth and ninth grades, respectively. High school seniors that year will go to the same school they now attend.
The board meeting stalled only on a discussion about the ethnic mix of the new schools. Board member Larry Mason asked zoning committee members if they had been more concerned with ethnic mixes or neighborhood schools.
According to district statistics, the northwest school will have 19.4 percent minority students, the southeast school will have 15.2 percent minority students and the northeast high school will have 75.2 percent minority students.
"What this picture paints to me is we're creating minority schools," Mason said. "Not to say it's right or wrong. But when you look at diversification, is that diversification?"
Committee member Judi Linn said the committee tried to create both neighborhood schools and ethnic mixes. She said she talked to hundreds of parents who lived around the new school sites who said they wanted their children to go to a nearby school.
"It's not what we want, it's what the parents want and they want to stay there," Linn told the board. "Yes, it's high ethnicity there (northeast). But that's the population there. They're tired of their children being bused out."
Board and committee members said the meeting drew few parents because many had voiced their opinions at committee workshops held in the past few weeks. At one meeting, several hundred parents complained about the southeast high school zone.
"This was amazing," board member Mary Beth Scow said about Wednesday's short meeting. "The process is good for parents. That helps the board a great deal."
Before the meeting, zoning committee leader Ora Dunson predicted there would be little controversy and few angry parents.
"Now people are aware these changes are going to happen because we are growing so fast," Dunson said. "Four years ago it was more treacherous than it is now."
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