Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Seniors, children lead population boom

Clark County ranked second in the nation in the number of school-age children gained in the first two years of this decade in a Census Bureau report released today, and third in the number of senior citizens added in the same period.

Clark County's population of children, ages 5 to 17, grew by 37,878, and the population of people 65 and older grew by 16,713 from April 2000 to July 2002, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

The implication is that the state in general is going to have an increasingly hard time providing the services unique to each population in the coming years, according to experts. School-age children and senior citizens are populations that require many taxpayer-funded programs.

Clark County School District employee Sharon Datolli is already struggling with the numbers. She remembers her school days in O'Fallon, Mo., a town of 3,000 three decades ago.

Those days were nothing like the ones she faces now, as she works with demographic information and school zoning issues for the district, which she describes as "always being behind the eight ball."

Census bureau spokesman Robert Bernstein said the growth in the school-age population in Clark County and Nevada is impressive, given that two-thirds of states nationwide saw decreases in this population during the same period.

State Demographer Jeff Hardcastle pointed out that not all those 5- to 17-year-olds moved to the state -- some were born in 1997 or before. In 1996 and 1997, for example, a total of 36,000 babies were born in the valley, he said.

Either way the new census numbers mean "we're going to be busy for a while," Datolli said, noting that the district's 10-year, $3.5 billion capital improvement program may fall short a few years before its time is up.

The 1998 program, paid for through bond sales, room taxes and real estate transfer taxes, is for building 88 schools across the Las Vegas Valley by 2008.

"If we keep up this kind of growth, we'll have to look for another bond by about 2006," Datolli said.

Fred Smith knows about building schools. As construction manager and interim assistant superintendent for facilities for the district, he has to see that 12 to 13 new schools are ready to open every year.

Even when that goal is reached, he said, "it's a constant battle to keep up with the growth."

In fact, the district can't, in the strictest sense -- about 10 percent of the estimated 268,000 students throughout the district spend their days in 1,100 portable, temporary classrooms that resemble construction-site trailers. The classrooms, while adequate, are not what parents, teachers and students would prefer, Smith said.

"(This) represents how difficult it is to predict and react to the shifting and growing student population," he said.

But the county will also be hard pressed at the other end of the age spectrum.

Charles Perry, executive director for the Nevada Health Care Association, a nonprofit representing the state's nursing homes, said the growth in the number of seniors during the period studied will stretch resources.

"It's like making an already bad situation worse ... (and) brings up the whole issue about who's going to pay for services for these people and how they're going to access them," Perry said.

Perry said 25 percent to 30 percent of the population will need a nursing home or some kind of assisted living at some point. The main issue for the state's nursing homes -- 25 of which are in Clark County -- is that there isn't enough staff, particularly nurses, to care for those who may need to stay in the homes, he said.

Nevada has a chronic nursing shortage, he said, leading to the situation where nursing homes in Clark County are filled only to 81 percent of their capacity "because you don't have the staff to take care of the people."

Perry also said that continued growth in the valley's senior citizen population would soon lead to a shortage in nursing home beds -- and that other services such as paratransit would soon be in short supply.

As for solutions -- "there's no magic bullet that I'm aware of," Perry said.

The nonprofit director was confident that the political will would be there to face challenges brought on by the increased numbers of senior citizens in the valley, however.

"It's been shown that the folks who go the polls are older people and government employees," he said. "So politicians will listen to them."

As for 5- to 17-year-olds, who don't vote, the school district's Smith said he has no doubt that funding for schools will be controversial in years to come -- as it was in the 2003 Legislature, when the schools budget was the main sticking point in producing a budget after two extra sessions. The eventual dollar amount agreed on was $1.3 billion.

Still, that might not be enough, Smith said.

"If you consider that we're funded at least $1,000 less per student than the national average, then every additional student brings us further behind," he said.

"Until we catch up to the national average, this will be a very contentious issue for upcoming Legislatures," he said.

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