For principals, it’s often 5 strikes and you’re out

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Friday, July 27, 2007 | 7:27 a.m.

Campuses qualify by having a high percentage of students score in the top bracket and reducing the percentage of lower scores.

Selma Bartlett Elementary School

Patricia Bendorf Elementary School

Blue Diamond Elementary School

Kermit Booker Sr. Elementary School

Doris French Elementary School

Judy and John Goolsby Elementary School

Frank Lamping Elementary School

Sandy Valley Elementary School

Ethel Staton Elementary School

Neil Twitchell Elementary School

Elise Wolff Elementary School

Booker achieved exemplary status without a campus of its own. The school operated out of portable classrooms at Wendell Williams Elementary School last year, awaiting the opening of its own replacement campus next month.

Sandy Valley is one of the district's smallest elementary schools, with about 250 students.

Notables: Boulder City High School is the only comprehensive high school in the School District to be designated as high achieving. Advanced Technologies Academy, a magnet high school, is a multiple past "Blue Ribbon" winner, the highest honor given by the U.S. Department of Education.

High achieving - growth Elementary schools

Notables: Stewart serves some of the district's most severely disabled students. Antonello is the only one of the four elementary campuses in the pilot empowerment program to be designated as high achieving. Of the remaining three schools, Culley made adequate progress while Adams and Warren did not.

Source: Clark County School District

Six Clark County school principals have spent most of the past year with guillotines hanging over their outstretched necks.

Some of them were still sweating Thursday.

Under federal law, schools that fail to improve test results over five consecutive years face sanctions, including possible takeover by the state education department. At the very least, districts are required to reorganize the schools' programs and replace key staff - typically starting with the principals.

Based on the results of standardized tests scores, announced by the district on Thursday, four schools - Bridger, Von Tobel and West middle schools and Tate Elementary School - have failed for five years to make the kind of progress the government demands under the No Child Left Behind Act.

The Nevada Education Department must now sign off on the designations given to the schools, including those at the bottom.

The state hasn't shown any interest in taking over those schools, Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes said Thursday.

But with the new academic year just a month away, Rulffes says he's not sure what to do about the principals who still have guillotines hanging over them.

He said he had no plans for a second overhaul of West Middle School, which was reconstituted and restructured last year, before it was legally required. The school has since shown strong improvement in test scores for many areas, particularly among eighth graders and students who had been at the campus for the entire academic year.

At Herron Elementary , which escaped the year-five label, Principal Kelly Sturdy hopped a jubilant little dance Thursday.

The campus was empty of students because of a track break. So instead of children, she showed off the sound systems and skylights in the renovated classrooms, and pointed out the elaborate murals students have been helping paint during the past few months.

She had been fairly certain that Herron would make adequate progress this year. She had been similarly confident last year - only to find out low scores by one special education student, out of a class of 25, had kept the entire school on the "needs improvement" list.

The reasons for Herron's upswing in achievement can be traced to several sources, starting with Sturdy's arrival in January 2003 .

Sturdy said instead of trying to improve the curriculum and instructional methods already in place, an option she equated to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, she began with overhauling the pre-kindergarten program and then worked her way up through the grades. The school added intensive early literacy programs, tutoring and parent workshops. Most of the school's classrooms now follow a dual-language program, where instructional time is divided equally between Spanish and English. Everyone participates, including Sturdy .

"The kids get a laugh when I mangle some of my sentences," she said.

The interventions and new language program are paying off, Sturdy said. Students who were in pre-kindergarten when she arrived four years ago have maintained their progress and are now among the top performers.

Along the way, more teachers have chosen to stay at the school, allowing Sturdy to spend more time with them and less time hunting for and training replacements. Herron had 26 new teachers in 2005 and 16 last year. This fall, only seven classroom positions needed to be filled.

The year long renovations project at the North Las Vegas campus may have helped Herron make academic progress this year. Sturdy consolidated several of her track schedules so students would be off campus when the most drastic construction work was being done. That gave her an additional three weeks of instructional days with students before the testing.

Many of the schools on the needs improvement list - including Herron - receive additional funding for poor students. After two years of low test scores at those schools, the district must offer students transportation to more successful campuses. For the 2003-04 academic year, when Herron was first required to offer school choice, about 90 of Sturdy's students left. This year, just four students - out of more than 1,000 - chose to attend other schools.

"We're building our reputation back up," Sturdy said.