District looks at dangerous, failing schools

Friday, Aug. 29, 2003 | 11:14 a.m.

The U.S. Department of Education has told Nevada to identify which of its schools are dangerous and begin offering transfers for students at those schools to safer campuses this fall.

That has state education officials scrambling because they hadn't planned to offer the transfers until 2005. The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires states to define "persistently dangerous schools" and then identify campuses that meet the criteria. School districts must then offer students at those schools transfers to safer campuses. There is no requirement that school districts provide transportation.

What's been a source of confusion is exactly when Nevada was supposed to begin offering the transfers. State education officials had said data collected during the 2002-03 school year would serve as the baseline, with the transfer option kicking in no earlier than 2005.

But federal education officials rejected that plan, said Mike Fitzgerald, consultant for the Nevada Department of Education.

Fitzgerald said he's been told by a liaison from the U.S. Department of Education that Nevada must evaluate school crime data from the 2000-01 and 2001-02 academic years as well.

Schools will be identified as persistently dangerous if they exceeded the criminal citation limit in 2002-03, plus at least one of the two prior school years, Fitzgerald said.

Supporters of the new law say it will improve school safety and accountability. But opponents say it was too easy for states to write definitions that excluded most -- if not all -- of its schools.

Nevada's definition of a persistently dangerous school -- approved by the state Board of Education earlier this summer -- requires criminal citations and arrests to exceed a set percentage of the student enrollment for two out of three consecutive years. The percentage varies according to enrollment size.

But before the past academic year, Nevada did not require school districts to submit campus-by-campus tallies of criminal citations. That means administrators must search records and reports by hand, said Brad Reitz, assistant superintendent of student support services for the Clark County School District.

Clark County had three campuses identified as meeting the persistently dangerous thresholds for 2002-03 -- Gibson Middle School and the Washington and Biltmore continuation high schools. Reitz said he believed Washington and Biltmore, the two alternative high schools, would be exempted from the list because the programs handle large numbers of students who are habitual discipline cases.

Administrators and the school police are in the process of combing through Gibson's records for the two additional school years as requested by the state, Reitz said.

Reitz said he doubted Gibson would have enough criminal citations in either year to qualify the campus as persistently dangerous. Gibson added an on-campus police officer last year which may have been the reason for the higher number of citations being issued, Reitz said.

The 26 citations issued during the last school year at Gibson were the result of a crackdown on criminal behavior that often begins beyond the school's boundaries and then spills onto the campus, Principal Crystal Helm said.

Older students from nearby high schools have been cited for fighting in Gibson's parking lot, and adults have also been cited for trespassing and making threats, according to school police records.

Nevada isn't alone in struggling to meet the safer school requirements under No Child Left Behind, said Kathy Christie, vice president of the Education Commission of the States Clearinghouse.

When that commission unveiled its database tracking compliance with No Child Left Behind in January, only a handful of states had tackled the definition of a persistently dangerous school, Christie said. As of this week, about half of the nation's states had come up with a definition and identified which -- if any -- of their schools meet the criteria, Christie said.

"There's been a lot of activity on the safer schools piece of No Child Left Behind, but all of it's been in the last few months," Christie said. "It's almost as if states have been doing triage with the requirements, picking out the ones that were the most pressing and then moving down the list."