Letter: School names least of educational woes

Thursday, July 22, 1999 | 9:39 a.m.

On July 14, 135 people signed up to testify on the naming of schools.

This is nothing short of amazing in that only one person gave public testimony on the district's $2 billion annual budget that was forwarded to the state containing millions of dollars worth of arithmetic mistakes.

Hundreds of students failed the state's competency test; less than three dozen parents complained.

Students' achievement test sores have gone down nine straight years and the district's student dropout rate is the highest in the nation, yet less than a half dozen people raised concerns for these educational issues.

The entire community supported passage of a revenue proposal to build schools, yet out of the over 100 A/E firms in the county, the same four firms get all like work.

Only two people have raised this as an issue, one in writing, and the other in public testimony.

If the highest educational priority remains the names that go on buildings, rather than the persons who design the buildings, at what cost and the lack of learning taking place inside the buildings, then look for the cost to preserve "domestic tranquility" to go up in the future.

E. LOUIS OVERSTREET Overstreet is a former member of the Clark County School District's Bond Oversight Committee