Bumping budgets in classes

Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005 | 11:11 a.m.

The Clark County School District should be exceeding the national average when it comes to the percentage of its budget that it spends on direct instruction, Interim Superintendent Walt Rulffes said.

At a work session with the School Board today, Rulffes plans to recommend the board set a goal of having classroom instructional services account for 66.75 percent of its operating expenditures.

Rulffes said while final figures were not yet available, he believed about 64 percent of the district's per-pupil spending in 2004-05 went to direct instruction. The national average is 65 percent, Rulffes said.

The School District's projected operating budget for the 2005-06 fiscal year is $1.8 billion. If the direct instruction percentage were raised to 66.75 percent from 64 percent, the total would go from $1.15 billion to $1.2 billion, an increase of about $49.5 million.

For 2003-04, the latest year for which information was available, 61 percent of the district's operating expenditures went to direct instruction. The statewide average was 61.2 percent.

"If we exceed the national average in some areas of our performance, it will be more credible when we go to the (2007) Legislature and ask (legislators) to raise funding to the national average," Rulffes said.

For the past two legislative sessions, raising per-pupil funding to the national average has been a rallying cry of the state's 17 school districts as well as the state teachers' union and a handful of lawmakers.

While the 2005 Legislature approved increasing the guaranteed per-pupil minimum to $4,486 from $4,295, that is still about $1,500 below the national average.

In a performance audit last year, the Legislative Counsel Bureau determined Clark County "compares favorably" with similar school districts in other states in the amount of funding that reached the classrooms.

Carolyn Edwards, a member of Nevadans for Quality Education, said any increase in dollars for direct instruction should go toward reducing class sizes. As reported by the Sun, Rulffes said he will encourage the School Board at today's meeting to recommend lower class sizes in kindergarten and grades 4-6.

The district began increasing class sizes in 2002 as more than $90 million had to be trimmed from the annual budget. Edwards said she agreed with Rulffes that restoring class sizes to the prior levels should be a priority.

"This is more than a worthy goal; it's a necessity," said Edwards, who is also president of the appointed committee that advises the School Board on attendance zone issues.

Emily Richmond can be reached at 259-8829 or at emily@lasvegassun.com.