Editorial: Frequent transfers don’t help students

Tuesday, March 18, 2003 | 8:56 a.m.

The numbers are troubling. Every year about 20,000 out of the 258,000 children who attend public schools in Clark County are transferred to different schools to ease overcrowding. And to get an idea of just how extreme this situation can become, consider the plight of sixth-grader Kevin Montoya. As reporter Emily Richmond noted in her Sunday story on the impact of school overcrowding, Montoya has been reassigned to five schools in five years -- even though his family has never moved from their Las Vegas home during that time.

It's obvious that students' academic performance isn't helped if they're constantly being shuffled from one school to the next. It's much easier for students to get lost if teachers don't know them, including their strengths and weaknesses. Nevertheless, transferring students out of overcrowded schools from high-growth areas, and placing them in schools that aren't as packed, is making the best of a bad situation. It's expected that in a valley experiencing a population explosion, such as ours, that redrawing school boundaries is inevitable. Still, the situation does point out that we're not spending enough money on education -- in this case not providing sufficient funding fast enough for new school construction that would allow us to keep up with growth.