Plan to split School District loses its champion in election

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Sunday, Nov. 12, 2006 | 1:22 a.m.

The most aggressive advocate for breaking up the Clark County School District has lost her soapbox as a state senator, leaving the education community to wonder who - if anyone - will pursue the issue.

For each of the last three legislative sessions, Sandra Tiffany, a Henderson Republican, had made it her first order of business to call for the breakup of the School District, which is the nation's fifth largest. On Tuesday, she lost her re-election bid.

Tiffany argued that schools - and students - would fare better in smaller districts. Opponents say a breakup would be cumbersome and expensive, with no guarantee of improvement for the more than 330 schools. It would also jeopardize the district's successful magnet school program and upset the balance of diversity that the district strives for when determining attendance zone boundaries.

Tiffany was traveling this week and could not be reached for comment on who might take up her torch.

Sens. Bob Beers and Barbara Cegavske, both R-Las Vegas, have also called for the countywide district to be broken into smaller ones, but have not been as outspoken as Tiffany.

Cegavske, who was re-elected Tuesday, said she shared Tiffany's belief that Clark County would benefit from smaller, more independent school districts. But that doesn't mean she'll become its leading champion.

"That was her fight," Cegavske said.

While Cegavske hasn't decided whether she'll author legislation calling for a breakup of the district, she believes smaller districts would allow parents and neighborhood communities more input in how schools operate.

The School District's decision to create five geographic regions in 2001 was an acknowledgment that its size had become unmanageable, Cegavske said.

Beers did not return calls for comment.

This fall the district added a new region: the Superintendent's Schools, which includes four "empowerment" campuses that have been granted more control over daily operations in exchange for stricter accountability. Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes has said if the empowerment schools perform as expected, he intends to expand the program by as many as 40 campuses next year.

If successful, the empowerment schools initiative may serve as a pre-emptive strike against renewed calls for breaking up the district. The district would be able to argue that schools have more control over instructional methods, staffing and budget decisions, all without losing the benefits that come with its size.

The national trend is for smaller school districts to combine and take advantage of the economies of scale. But the majority of those cases involved tiny school districts .

In 2005 legislators authorized a $250,000 study of how a breakup of the Clark County School District would be carried out. Issues include distributing debt for the $3.5 billion capital improvement plan, launched in 1998, and whether diversity at individual campuses would suffer as a result. But because lawmakers couldn't agree on a consultant, the study was not conducted.