Plans unveiled for new center for special education

By Emily Richmond

Thursday, Jan. 20, 2005 | 9:53 a.m.

Plans for Nevada's first campus designed solely for students with emotional and behavioral disabilities were unveiled Wednesday by the Clark County School District.

The Miley Achievement Center, a 38,950-square-foot facility to be built near the intersection of Pecos Road and Stewart Avenue in eastern Las Vegas, is slated to open for the 2006-07 academic year.

The district's specialized program, which serves students from early childhood to age 22 as required by federal law, is currently housed in the Miley center on the campus of Cannon Junior High School on Russell Road near Eastern Avenue. The new facility will allow the district to increase enrollment from its current level of 72 students to as many as 200 students.

Miley Achievement Center will offer social skill instruction, self-management as well as a complete academic program, said Principal Karyn Durbin.

Durbin, who did her own student teaching assignment at Miley 28 years ago, said the new campus will also offer "real world" training.

"Vocational experiences are important to this population of students and in the new school there will be classrooms specifically geared toward the development of employment skills and job opportunities," Durbin said in a written statement.

The new school will be a "wonderful opportunity," said Karyn Taycher, executive director of Parents Educating Parents, a statewide support network for families of children with disabilities.

"It's important to have a continuum of care, from preventative to intensive services," said Taycher, whose organization serves about 5,000 Clark County families each year. "This program will certainly fill an important need."

However, Taycher said, it's also important that students with disabilities have access to public education in the least-restrictive environment possible.

One of the goals of programs like Miley is to provide students with intensive assistance so that they can rejoin their neighborhood schools, Taycher said.

"Students with special needs should not be segregated," Taycher said. "We would encourage the decision-making teams, the parents and the teachers, to make sure students are placed appropriately."

With more than 280,000 students, Clark County is the nation's fifth-largest school district. In the 2003-04 academic year, 10 percent of the district's students were identified as having special education needs.

The school is named in memory of Aldyne P.Miley, who coordinated the district's special education programs in the 1970s and 1980s and died in 1985.