Beers wants School District cuts

Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2004 | 11:07 a.m.

Clark County School District's management can expect its size and scope to be challenged during the 2005 legislative session by at least two lawmakers.

Sen. Bob Beers, R-Las Vegas, has filed a bill draft request that would prohibit school districts from having the total number of off-site administrators exceed the total number of schools.

"There are administrators in the Clark County School District that see actual students, I fear, twice a year" at most, Beers said. "They have lost track of what they're supposed to be doing."

Beers is also working on a separate bill draft request that would prohibit employment of an administrator who had not spent at least one semester teaching in the prior five years.

"The term 'principal' is a derivative of the term 'principal teacher,' " said Beers, who was elected to the Senate this year after three sessions in the Assembly. "They are supposed to be master teachers leading others. How can you do that if you're out of touch with the real world of the classroom?"

The requirement would also apply to the district's upper-level administrators, including Superintendent Carlos Garcia and his cabinet, Beers said.

Beers said he is also looking for other lawmakers interested in co-sponsoring a bill that would limit campus enrollments or move to break up the Clark County School District into smaller, more manageable individual districts.

Both are proposals that have been floated, without success, in past legislative sessions by various lawmakers.

All of those proposals will again face stiff opposition, said Stephen Augspurger, executive director of the Clark County Association of School Administrators.

"Those who make the claim that we're top-heavy don't really understand the work that goes on in schools," Augspurger said.

"We don't have enough administrators, we don't have enough teachers and we don't have enough funding," Augspurger said. "At the same time, more is being expected of us every day, and everybody is raising the bar for their own performance all the time."

His organization recently brokered a deal with the district that no new initiatives would be handed down to principals by the central office, giving school staff some breathing room to focus on the myriad programs and services already under way, Augspurger said.

Assemblyman Marcus Conklin, D-Las Vegas, has also revived a bill draft request he presented during the 2003 legislative session that would limit administrative staffing in Clark County and Washoe County school districts. In 2003, at the time the bill was considered by the Assembly Education Committee, Conklin sought to limit Clark County to one administrator per 352 students and one administrator per 311 students in Washoe County.

The ratios Conklin will pursue this time was not immediately known.

As of this week, the Clark County School District had 1,079 administrators with a student enrollment of 280,834, or one administrator for every 260 students. The district, the nation's fifth-largest, has 301 campuses. Administration accounts for about 3 percent of the district's operating budget of $1.6 billion.

Last month the Clark County School Board approved spending $1.375 million to add 15 additional assistant principals for the district's elementary schools. Hiring for the position was frozen in 2001 as the district faced budget shortfalls, requiring one vice principal to cover two smaller campuses.

But this summer the School Board rejected a bid by Garcia to add three additional assistant region superintendent positions, at a cost of more than $300,000 annually, saying he had not made the case for increasing upper-level administration.

The assistant region superintendents would have been assigned to work with principals at the district's lowest-achieving schools, Garcia said.

Assemblywoman Bonnie Parnell, D-Carson City, chairwoman of the Assembly Education Committee, said she doesn't think the number of school administrators in rural Nevada is a problem.

Parnell, a retired schoolteacher, said the Carson City School District is "very careful" in appointing administrators.

She said it may be a problem in Clark County because the district is so large and she would be willing to take a look at the bills. But she said she wants to take a look first at a legislative audit of school districts ordered by the 2003 Legislature.

The legislative audit of the Clark County School District will be released Jan. 6. The audit of the Washoe County School District has already been published.

Parnell said the audits "should shed light" on whether the school districts are top-heavy with administrators.

Sen. Maurice Washington, R-Sparks, leads the Senate Committee on Human Resources & Facilities, which handles education bills, could not be reached for comment this morning.