Anxious Silverado parents await school rezoning decision

Jace Radke

Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2000 | 10:34 a.m.

Although 14 miles separate two high schools in the southeast part of the Las Vegas Valley, the differences between the two schools stretch much farther than that.

Silverado High School sits in fast growing southern Las Vegas near Serene and Eastern avenues, and is 42 percent over capacity with 3,600 students bursting its seams despite 25 portable classrooms.

Foothill High School is in the slower developing area off College Drive and U.S. 95 in Henderson, has no portable classrooms and only 1,278 students.

The schools are linked by the Attendance Zone Advisory Commission, which was expected to make a recommendation to the Clark County School Board today to help alleviate overcrowding at Silverado by busing students to Foothills.

The advisory panel will likely pass on a proposal that will send new students who live as close as a quarter-mile to Silverado to Foothill next year. The students would be rezoned for a new high school south of Silverado the following year.

Two new schools in two years is something that many of the approximately 150 parents and students who gathered at Monday night's Zone Advisory Commission public comment meeting don't want to deal with.

"To have a kid move from Silverado zone to Foothill to the new school is ridiculous," Deborah Cohen, a parent who attended the meeting at Cannon Middle School, said. "Every year the zoning is changed around, and we get a Band-Aid effect that doesn't address the problem."

Lillie Thomas, whose daughter fights through crowded hallways and waits in line for the bathroom at Silverado, said the problem was caused when Foothill was built.

"Foothill was built in a bad place where the growth hasn't really hit yet," Thomas said.

Under the advisory board's plan, incoming freshmen and new students who live in two parts of the Silverado zone would be sent to Foothill.

One extends between Interstate 15 and Bermuda Road and between Windmill Lane and Silverado Ranch, from Silverado Ranch to Eastern Avenue and from Eastern out to the precinct boundary -- the neighborhood in which Silverado is located.

The other part of the zone is bordered by Pecos Road on the west, Robindale Road on the north, Green Valley Parkway on the east and Lake Mead Drive on the south.

Foothill opened without a senior class this year, but even with one next year the school is projected to have only about 1,800 students with a capacity of 2,500.

A new high school is slated to open in 2001 about 3 miles from Silverado at Maryland Parkway and Buena Vida.

Parents asked that the advisory panel look at sending students in the northern portion of Silverado's zone to Chaparral, Valley or Green Valley high schools, but Dusty Dickens, director of demographics, zoning and realty for the Clark County School District, said that wasn't feasible.

Chaparral is 6 percent over capacity and Green Valley is 27 percent over, while Valley, although under capacity by about 150 students, needs those seats for its magnet program, Dickens said.

"Not one person on AZAC is comfortable with making a recommendation that would overcrowd Chaparral or the other schools," Dickens said. "It has not been the position of the district or AZAC to relieve the overcrowding at one school by overcrowding another."

On Feb. 29 the School Board will meet in a special session in which it will be given the zone commission's recommendation, and the public will again be able to comment.