Wanted: Moms and dads to lobby for school funds; travel required

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Saturday, Oct. 21, 2006 | 8:03 a.m.

The Clark County School District is thinking of recruiting parents to go to Carson City, to personally lobby politicians for more education money.

But first, it has got to figure out how to get parents to attend a meeting just down the street.

The idea of asking parents to lean on legislators was one of the quiet goals at the Tuesday night meeting of the Clark County School Board.

The meeting was advertised on the district's Web site, and notices were sent out to every community, parent and business group e-mail list the district has. In a district with 300,000 students, only about 40 parents showed up.

Still, Clark County School Board member Susan Brager said she was encouraged to see a few new faces mixed in with the die-hard crowd.

"If we start drawing people in now, we'll have a terrific network in place by the time the Legislature starts its work," an optimistic Brager said.

The stated purpose of the meeting was to familiarize parents with the convoluted formula Nevada uses to calculate support for its schools, identify funding requests for the upcoming legislative session, and seek suggestions for improving how the district communicates with the community.

District officials are also looking for parents to advocate on behalf of public education.

"Even though this audience isn't very large, you are representing many other parents," said Assemblywoman Debbie Smith, D-Sparks, who was invited to talk about the education funding challenges of the upcoming legislative session. "My message to you is to please stay involved."

She noted, for instance, that while many legislators support funding for full-day kindergarten sessions for all students, parents will need to speak up if such a measure is to pass.

But before the district can hope that parents will communicate with politicians, the district needs to better communicate with parents, said Cheri Grossman, a fifth-grade teacher at Gilbert Elementary School.

"No flier (announcing this meeting) went out from my school, no flier came home from my son's school or my daughter's school," said Grossman, whose children attend O'Callaghan Middle School and Eldorado High School. "I don't know how they thought parents would know about this."

There's precedence for rallying parental support in Carson City: In 2003, when the passage of the state's education budget stalled in a legislative logjam, parents from across the state formed a caravan and headed to the capital. Denise Reitz, who has a daughter at Grey Elementary School and a son at Bonanza High School, wants to push for a similar show of support this time around, even though she knows many parents are busy.

"It's time-consuming to do something like that," Reitz said. "Why do we have to go to such extremes to get our Legislature to recognize Las Vegas is huge?"

Still, she was up for the battle.

"We need to rally the district as a whole, stick together and bombard the North," Reitz said. "We will not give up."