Editorial: Our schools, our budget

Sunday, June 17, 2007 | 7:04 a.m.

O ne of the more outstanding teachers in the Clark County School District over the past three decades will not be returning to his Bob Miller Middle School classroom in the fall.

David Boshko, whose skill at teaching history earned him a place in the district's Education Hall of Fame, will instead inspire students as a part-time teacher at the private Foothills Montessori School.

Boshko, who taught for 11 years in New Mexico before coming here in 1978, discussed his departure from the district with Las Vegas Sun reporter Emily Richmond.

Her story on Wednesday contained insights about the uphill battle district teachers face every day.

Boshko had to look back to the early 1990s to remember when class sizes were tolerable. "Then the rapid growth started, and class sizes went up, up, up," Boshko said.

At the Montessori school, Boshko will have 15 students. "I'm so used to 35 or 37 kids in a class it might be a shock to my system," he said.

Given his perspective, it is more understandable why student achievement levels here are consistently disappointing.

"Large classes take it out of you, " Boshko related. "There are more discipline problems. I had 180 to 200 students a year. If you ask one essay question on a test, how do you find time to read and correct all the answers?

In a separate story, Richmond wrote about a new state mandate for Nevada's high schools - a formal sit-down with all ninth graders to plan their course of study through graduation.

The story pointed out, however, that each guidance counselor in the district is assigned about 400 students, when 250 is the recommended standard. We wonder how such a mandate can be carried out when the counselors are so overloaded.

Contained in the articles are just a sampling of the reasons why K-12 education funding, so incomprehensibly slighted by the 2007 Nevada Legislature, needs much more than just incremental increases once every two years.