LOOKING IN ON: EDUCATION

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Thursday, July 5, 2007 | 7:29 a.m.

After lawmakers wouldn't pay for the Clark County School District's empowerment schools program, Superintendent Walt Rulffes scrounged $1.2 million from his budget to support four additional campuses when the new academic year begins in August.

Booker, Bracken, Sewell and Kitty Ward elementary schools will adopt the empowerment model, which gives principals more flexibility in designing programs, and in staffing and budget matters , in exchange for stricter accountability.

But to stretch the dollars, Rulffes cut the per-pupil allocation. The newly named campuses will receive $400 more per student - but that's less than the $600 bonus allocated to the first four empowerment schools. Adams, Antonello, Culley and Warren elementary schools were promised the $600 per-pupil subsidy for at least three years.

Rulffes steered away from tapping a middle school or high school for the empowerment program because campuses with larger enrollments cost more to support.

"I would have liked to have had a secondary campus in this round, but the size of the school drives the cost," Rulffes said. "For us to support a high school with 3,000 students would have been very difficult."

Rulffes said reducing the per-pupil allocation at the next round of schools might breed resentment. But it would be unfair to ask the first four schools to cut programs put in place based on the $600 pledge, Rulffes said.

At the end of the three years, those schools may have to adjust their budgets to the $400 allocation, Rulffes said.

Early test results for the empowerment schools were mixed this year. Antonello and Culley showed strong gains overall in mathematics and literacy. Adams had some improvements as well as slight declines in test scores, while academic performance plummeted at Warren.

The 2007 Legislature set aside nearly $10 million for empowerment schools statewide over the biennium, but the Clark County School District will receive just $50,000 in the first year to help with planning and design.

The Nevada Education Department is required to evaluate the effectiveness and quality of a federally funded tutoring program, but finding a company to do the job is proving tough.

Nevada's public schools have spent nearly $12 million on the tutoring program since 2004, using federal money earmarked for schools serving the highest percentages of children from low-income households. But there has been minimal oversight of the tutoring providers approved by the state, and no substantive evaluation of student achievement or performance.

Fawn Lewis, the education department consultant overseeing the tutoring program, sought advice from her counterparts in other states, asking which vendors were recommended, and how other states measure tutors' performance.

What she got was a flood of e-mails, asking her the same questions.

Have you heard from anyone yet? Has anyone else found someone to do the job? How are you planning to evaluate the companies?

As of 2006, Nevada was one of at least 48 states that had yet to put an evaluation model in place, largely because the federal law provided no funding for the project. The state education department has since budgeted $50,000 for the evaluation, which will involve examining data for the more than 7,000 students taking part in the tutoring program. Most of those contracts are in Clark County, where the largest of eight tutoring providers is the Clark County Public Education Foundation, an affiliate of the teachers union.

The deadline for submitting proposals, and the completed 33-page application, is July 13.

As of Monday Lewis had received two phone calls and one brief letter from a researcher announcing his intentions to submit a bid.

One of the phone calls came from a woman at a well-known educational research firm in Boston.

"She told me they could evaluate 154 kids for $70,000 to $80,000," Lewis said. "I said, 'Think more kids, less money.' I haven't heard back from her since."