Erasing school boundaries

Thursday, Nov. 23, 2006 | 6:55 a.m.

Attendance zone boundary lines could evaporate in the Clark County School District's northeast region if a pilot program allowing open enrollment wins support from the 2007 Legislature.

The district will ask lawmakers for extra transportation funds for the program, which would allow students to choose from a list of schools with available space.

If approved, the program could be up and running by the 2008-09 academic year, said Marsha Irvin, northeast region superintendent.

The northeast region, which extends north of Owens Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard, includes Moapa Valley and Virgin Valley. The region has 51 campuses and serves about 50,000 students.

Open enrollment would "lend itself to positive competition among schools," Irvin said. Parents would be able to choose among campuses based on the special programs and services unique to each.

Clark County's willingness to explore open enrollment is encouraging, said UCLA management professor Bill Ouchi, who has studied public education systems.

But open enrollment has little meaning unless each school is free to design its own program, control staff hiring and training, and compete for students, Ouchi said.

"If you have autonomy for principals and no choice for parents, principals would have the freedom to improve their schools but no incentive," Ouchi said.

"If there's open enrollment but no autonomy, all the parents will fight to get into the one good school, the principals won't have the ability to improve their schools to effectively compete and most of the people will be unhappy."

The School District is in the early months of experimenting with autonomy, with four campuses designated "empowerment schools" being given greater control over day-to-day operations in exchange for stricter accountability. None of the empowerment campuses is in the district's northeast region.

Open enrollment is more common in districts with stable or declining student populations. Clark County has added at least 10 new schools in each of the past five years, and attendance zone boundaries are redrawn each year, affecting tens of thousands of students valleywide.

Initially, Irvin considered limiting the program to the region's elementary or secondary schools. But the decision ultimately was to push for open enrollment in grades K-12.

"We felt this would allow us the opportunity to impact all families in the region," Irvin said.

Currently, the district sets attendance zone boundaries based on students' home addresses. Students who meet certain conditions may apply for a zone variance to attend a campus other than the one to which they are assigned.

The fine print of the pilot program is still being worked out, including how the application process would work and its potential costs. Also at issue is whether principals would have the option of designating a certain percentage of seats for open enrollment and a percentage for zone variances.

The Clark County School Board is expected to review the proposal Nov. 30.

The pilot program will depend on securing funding to pay for transportation, Irvin said.

"There's a strong belief that if you don't offer transportation, you're really not offering choice," Irvin said.

If successful, the open enrollment program could be expanded districtwide, Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes said.

"I'm in favor of a market-based system," Rulffes said.

Jean Jackson, principal of Cahlan-Edison Elementary School in North Las Vegas, said she is excited about the proposed open enrollment experiment.

Cahlan has ranked as one of the northeast region's top achievers academically in recent years and was one of the district's "high achieving" campuses in 2005.

"I would hope they (families) would want to come to me - it's always a good thing to give people a choice," Jackson said.

Principals should have some say in the enrollment decisions, such as being allowed to set aside seats for students whose parents teach at a school, Jackson said.

"I'd like to see a little professional courtesy afforded to the staff," Jackson said.

It's unlikely that open enrollment would result in major changes in curriculum at Cahlan, Jackson said, although she could envision an aggressive campaign to lure new students and retain current ones.

"I don't want our parents to think we're not giving kids everything we can right now," Jackson said. "But I would certainly make sure we marketed ourselves to get the word out there."

Ouchi predicted that the majority of students taking advantage of open enrollment in the northeast region would be at the middle and high school levels.

In lower grades, parents are more comfortable having their child at the campus closest to home, Ouchi said.

"What parents really want isn't to put their child on a bus but for that neighborhood school to be a better school," he said.