Scouts pledge to aid schools with low fees

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Thursday, May 27, 2004 | 10:55 a.m.

After nine months of wrangling and negotiating, Clark County School District officials say they've come up with a facilities-use fee policy that even the Boy Scouts can get behind.

Faced with ever-rising power bills, the district began assessing fees for nonprofit groups last summer, a move that angered community organizations such as scouting troops and athletic clubs. But Jim Howard of the district's budget office said the utilities, custodial overtime and wear and tear on school sites was costing more than $1 million a year.

Based on the district's initial proposal made in August, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts faced meeting fees of $30 to $50 per hour. The latest proposal, expected to go to the Clark County School Board next month, would allow nonprofit groups to pay as little as $5 per hour.

"We were ready to go to war over this; now we're feeling a lot more peaceful," said Philip Bevins, scout executive of the Boulder Dam Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America. "This is a thousand-fold improvement. It's still regrettable that a public school district would face the fiscal troubles that would make any of this necessary, but we're prepared to support the plan."

The Girl Scouts of Frontier Council are also in a better frame of mind, said membership specialist Holly Smith. While the organization's executive board still needs to review the proposal, Smith said she was pleased to see some of the Girl Scout's earlier recommendations had been incorporated.

For example, a school's principal will be allowed to waive wear-and-tear fees in exchange for the troop carrying out a community service project.

"The principals have a lot of leeway, and most of our troops are made up of students from the school where we meet," Smith said. "This also gives us the chance to match up our activities to the school site's particular needs."

The latest version of the district's proposal calls for nonprofit groups to pay on a sliding scale depending on the frequency of use, number of users and whether or not the school would otherwise be kept open.

A group made up entirely of school district students that meets regularly during normal campus hours and uses only one room would pay a flat fee of $10 per meeting. The Diocese of Las Vegas, which has the St. Francis of Assisi parish holding services at Twitchell Elementary School in Green Valley, pays $437 a week for 7.5 hours.

Religious groups make up about 10 percent of the nonprofit groups that use district facilities each week, Howard said.

From July to May 4, the district has collected $951,517 in reimbursements for facilities use, up 44 percent from the previous year. Much of the additional money came from the district switching the responsibility for billing and collecting from individual school sites to the central accounting office, Howard said.

For the first time campuses are sharing the profit, Howard said. From August to January, more than $100,000 in usage fees went directly to the schools.

In reviewing how the district's existing regulations were being applied, Howard said he turned up a number of problems. Some athletic leagues weren't paying enough to cover the cost of lighting playing fields and having custodians on site.

It also turned out that several teachers were using their classrooms for early morning and after-school workshops where they charged their own students to attend, Howard said. Those individuals have been notified that they were in violation of district regulations and the practice has been terminated, Howard said.

"We have to make sure that the rules are applied to everyone," Howard said. "We can't have people slipping in at the taxpayers' expense."