Taking inventory no easy task at Clark County schools

Monday, May 11, 1998 | 8:11 a.m.

Among some of the items missing from Las Vegas High School alone: a theater spotlight, two ice making machines, a sousaphone, an exercise cycle, two ovens, a 42-by-42-foot wrestling mat, and a portable, electric grease filtering machine, an investigation by the Las Vegas Sun revealed.

"A lot of stuff goes unaccounted for just because of a lack of good inventory and accounting," said Don Lee, district business manager.

Last month, district officials began the annual process of trying to inventory more than 76,000 pieces of equipment valued at $500 or more.

Officials expect to uncover what they found last year: nearly $6 million of $160 million worth of district property turned up missing or stolen, was deemed worthless and discarded without documentation, or was just plain lost.

Officials admit their outdated inventory system fails to accurately uncover how much of the district's vast equipment holdings disappeared during the year. Ultimately, students lose, they admit.

"If we have computer labs where the computers are missing, kids miss out," said Kathryn Vasquez, Las Vegas High School assistant principal. "If microscopes are missing from science labs, kids miss out."

The district's inventory problems are rooted in a system that relies on overworked staff who do manual checks of thousands of pieces of equipment - at a time when most large companies are using bar codes and scanner guns.

Each April, the district's accounting office spits out about 76,000 computer cards, each describing a piece of district equipment. The cards are bundled by school - high schools have as many as 2,000 - and mailed to each building. Teachers, school secretaries and principals are expected to walk around the schools to manually check that each piece of equipment matches a card.

But the task is so overwhelming, so time consuming, that some schools don't even bother, officials admit. Some schools simply send a memo back to the central office claiming that everything is accounted for.

Problems at Las Vegas High School are probably representative of many schools that have done little inventory in recent years, officials said.

Assistant principal Kathryn Vasquez, in her first year at the school, has undertaken a massive project to track school equipment. She is directing teachers in an effort to check and double check classrooms, staff rooms, even a forgotten storage area under a walkway, to itemize materials and log them in a computer.

"We went on an Easter egg hunt, room-to-room to find what was on the list," English department chairman Ron Fick said.

After hours of combing, about 300 of roughly 2,000 pieces of equipment have not been found, Vasquez said.

Many of the missing items at Las Vegas High, including a baby grand piano and a dry ice making machine, probably never even made it to five-year old school, she said.

The new Las Vegas High opened on East Sahara Avenue in 1993 when the old Las Vegas High on Seventh Street became Las Vegas Academy. Much of the equipment in the old school was transferred but some disappeared in the move, officials said.

Officials said its unlikely most missing equipment is stolen, either by district employees or burglars.

"Someone doesn't steal a copy machine," said Walt Rulffes, district chief financial officer. "It just gets shipped off somewhere and the paper work doesn't follow."

Rulffes estimated less than half of last year's $6 million in missing equipment was stolen. The majority of it was misplaced or broken and discarded without record, he said.

"That would be human error," Rulffes said. "It's a paperwork issue more than anything."

Spending money on an inventory system comes down to an issue of priorities, school officials said.

"We try to spend as much money as we can right in the classrooms," said Superintendent Brian Cram said. "But we want to maintain good inventory and not lose materials."

"Our problem is we're trying to educate children first, and some people might see some of those other expenditures as frivolous," said School Board President Susan Brager. "In the long run, it could be a good investment."