Attention deficit

Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005 | 8:06 a.m.

On a hot, bright day last week outside Sandy Valley School, the loudest sounds were the American and Nevada flags snapping in the brisk fall breeze.

At the edge of the public school's parking lot, gravel gives way to dirt. Horses crowd at the fence of a nearby home as white ducks waddle on the lawn.

The hustle and bustle of the rest of Clark County School District, the nation's fifth-largest and fastest-growing school district, seem far away.

The distance is more than geographic.

Some parents and school supporters say Sandy Valley has been ignored by district officials, who have let the overcrowded campus sit despite a pledge seven years ago to expand it.

The School District covers all of Clark County -- which is a little bigger than Massachusetts -- including several rural communities such as Sandy Valley, whose residents sometimes feel their schools don't get the same attention as urban schools.

"We're left to the very last because we don't live in the city," said Sandy Valley resident Beth Bacher, a leader of an informal coalition that is raising concerns. "People forget we're out here unless we show up at the School Board meeting and complain."

There are few other public education options for residents of Sandy Valley, 18 miles west of Jean near the California border. Students who get permission to go to another school face a daily commute that can easily be 75 miles round trip.

The Sandy Valley school is considered to be an "at risk" school -- it has a high percentage of children from low-income households and has struggled to perform on standardized tests -- and receives extra federal funding.

Its campus, a concrete building surrounded by a horseshoe of portable buildings, is beyond its capacity with a current population of 250 students in kindergarten through eighth grade.

Space is tight. Half the music room's floor space is taken up by instruments and a similar lack of storage space in the art classroom means the walls are covered with a hodgepodge of plastic storage bins.

In the library, books are crammed so tightly on the shelves that some younger students struggle to pull out volumes. Boxes crowd the floor. A computer has been placed on the only available surface -- a high countertop. Students use a step stool to reach the keyboard. There aren't enough desks or seats to accommodate some of the larger classes, so some students have to stand while they are in the library.

There's also no room for students to visit the library beyond their assigned class periods.

"We want them using the library as much as possible," librarian Carol Byrd said, speaking above the thumps and bangs of first graders in the classroom next door. "It's not very conducive to have a middle schooler come in asking questions about a book report or research paper when there's already a bunch of very little kids in here."

Expanding Sandy Valley's facilities was one of the original items listed in the $3.5 billion capital improvement plan approved by voters in 1998. The district finally asked for bids last winter, but the project hit a snag -- the bids came back at $5.9 million, nearly twice the expected amount.

The 15,000-square-foot building was redesigned with a wooden frame, cutting out much of the concrete and $2.5 million in projected costs.

School officials say the wood frame is perfectly safe, but Bacher said the district "wouldn't dare" build such a school in the Las Vegas Valley.

"There's no one who will tell you wood-frame construction is the better material," she said. "I find it very difficult to believe that they (school officials) couldn't find some concrete somewhere if they put their minds to it."

Paul Gerner, district associate superintendent of facilities, said a wood-frame building is a sensible short-term solution. With the populations of both Jean and Primm climbing, it may be only a few years before the district needs to build a full-sized school to serve those communities, making the outlying Sandy Valley campus no longer necessary, he said.

The district hopes to finalize a contract by November for a $3.5 million wooden-frame school to be ready for the start of the 2006-07 academic year.

Sandy Valley's new building will have middle school classrooms, separate rooms for science, art and music and a full library. A separate addition, housing elementary school classrooms, will hopefully be built down the road, said Marilyn Miks, principal of the Sandy Valley, Goodsprings and Blue Diamond campuses.

Miks said she understood that the district made areas with the most pressing growth issues higher priorities. But the needs of the rural communities must also be met, she said.

"This may sound like small potatoes to some people, but to us it's going to make an enormous difference in what we're able to do for our students," Miks said. "I guess it's all a matter of perspective."

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