Tiffany reviews Garcia plan for school district

Terry Webster

Thursday, Jan. 18, 2001 | 10:58 a.m.

Clark County Schools Superintendent Carlos Garcia and the author of an initiative petition that sought to break up the school district were to meet today to review details of his plan to decentralize the bureaucracy.

"I want to see exactly how he will decentralize," Assemblywoman Sandra Tiffany, R-Henderson, said Wednesday, "what the areas will be, what the goals are and how he will measure whether it is successful or not."

Garcia's plan would create regions within the district, each with a semiautonomous superintendent.

Speaking on "POV Vegas," the Sun's news discussion show on Las Vegas ONE, Cox cable channels 1 and 39, Tiffany reaffirmed her decision to back away from an appeal of the petition, which failed to gain enough votes in the required 13 of 17 Nevada counties. It fell short by about 20 votes in Mineral County, and Tiffany had challenged the secretary of state's ruling on the signature count.

The petition would have changed a state law to allow voters to decide whether the most populated counties can have more than one school district.

Tiffany was joined on the show by Assemblyman Wendell Williams, D-Las Vegas, a schoolteacher and chairman of the Legislature's interim committee on education. The two legislators, who return to Carson City next month for the 2001 session, clashed over the need for Tiffany's petition.

Williams called Tiffany's petition a "last ditch, desperate move," after a similar deconsolidation bill authored by her failed to move forward in 1995. A state study determined at the time that it was not feasible for Nevada.

Further, Williams said, people who testified before the Legislative Committee on Education, which he chairs, said they did not favor deconsolidation.

But Tiffany pointed out that tens of thousands of people supported the petition.

"The overwhelming grass-roots part is not desperation," she said. "It's a way that people can have the opportunity to speak outside of the Legislature."

Tiffany said Garcia's plan appears to address her concerns about the district being too large, unresponsive and not providing a quality education.

"In my opinion, he is reacting to what parents said," Tiffany said.

However, Tiffany added, she will introduce legislation to form a committee to deconsolidate the district when it reaches 275,000 students. Currently standing at 231,000 students, the Clark County School District is the sixth largest in the nation.