Rulffes presses for families’ choice in school attendance

By Emily Richmond

Thursday, Aug. 13, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes wants students to pick the schools they want to attend, provided there is space — a proposal that in other districts has led to more innovative programs as campuses compete to fill their seats.

The invitation would go to students from first grade through high school and could take effect in the 2010-11 school year if he gets School Board support, Rulffes said.

Currently, students are assigned to schools based on their home addresses. Those who meet certain conditions may ask to attend different campuses.

Many districts in the country offer some version of open enrollment, in which students bid for their schools of choice and are not automatically assigned to their neighborhood campuses. Rulffes’ plan is a modified version in which students would, by default, be assigned to their neighborhood schools but could ask to attend other schools that might, for instance, offer more attractive academic programs, extracurricular activities or be close to a parent’s work. If there’s room on that campus, it’s a deal.

Because of the budget crunch, families would have to provide transportation, Rulffes said.

The district has made several unsuccessful bids to the Legislature for transportation dollars to support an open enrollment pilot program. And the state’s bleak fiscal outlook doesn’t bode well for a major investment in a new educational initiative. But Rulffes said it’s time to move forward, even if it’s on a smaller scale, and he’s optimistic there will be community support for the initiative.

“Participation might be low to start, but at least it would provide some students with more options,” Rulffes said Wednesday. “The success of our magnet programs tells us families want more choices.”

Open enrollment is more common in districts with stable or declining student populations because they are more flexible in accommodating shifting students. For nearly 10 years Clark County was one of the nation’s fastest-growing school districts, with annual enrollment increases of 4 percent to 6 percent.

With the region’s economy foundering, enrollment growth slowed to just under 1 percent last year. This year it’s possible that there will be no enrollment growth, with some indicators suggesting the county’s population might decline slightly.

One of the objectives of open-enrollment districts is to allow children in underperforming schools the opportunity to attend better-performing schools.

But Clark County’s efforts to accomplish that has garnered little parental support.

Although the district’s magnet programs and career academies have waiting lists, a federally mandated school choice program that allows tens of thousands of children attending low-performing Title 1 schools to enroll in higher-achieving schools has been utilized by fewer than 800 students a year.

One reason is that most parents are generally satisfied with their children’s schools, regardless of the federal rankings. And parents of students in the lower grades typically favor the convenience and perceived safety of neighborhood schools over bus rides across town to other campuses, even if they are higher performing.

The desire of parents to keep their children in neighborhood schools even when they have the option of sending them to better schools is also apparent at six poorly performing schools in West Las Vegas. Starting in 1994, the district has assigned students at the Prime Six schools to more ethnically and socioeconomically diverse schools in the valley, and provided the transportation to get them there. Almost without exception, the assigned schools have stronger records of academic achievement than the Prime Six campuses.

If parents object, they have to ask that their children attend their neighborhood schools or apply to one of three nearby magnet schools.

The Prime Six program’s popularity has dwindled. And now, with the overwhelming majority of families choosing to keep their children in the neighborhood Prime Six schools, those campuses have become “extremely disadvantaged and isolated student bodies,” according to a review by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA that was requested by Rulffes. Test scores of students at the majority of the Prime Six schools are significantly lower than those of their peers who attend the better-performing schools, and are below the districtwide average. West Las Vegas students who attended the assigned schools and magnet schools were also less segregated by race and poverty than their peers at the Prime Six schools.

Before the district embarks on an expanded open enrollment initiative, the realities of the Prime Six program need to be addressed, said Linda Young, a member of the Clark County School Board. The program was formulated in response to a lawsuit first filed by the Las Vegas Alliance of Black School Educators in 1989. Young, a West Las Vegas principal at the time, was a member.

She said she welcomed the findings by the UCLA researchers.

“This is a great opportunity for us to correct a long-standing, historically oppressive situation in the African-American community,” Young said. “The Prime Six plan was always supposed to have continuous review. Instead it’s been spotty at best and to a large extent, not reviewed at all.”

Young said she supports the concept of open enrollment, even without the money for transportation. But the initiative won’t work unless there is a concerted effort to inform families of their options. Schools also need to have the flexibility to develop programs that will attract a diverse student body, Young said. The UCLA review, which will be the subject of a special School Board meeting at 2 p.m. today, offers little in the form of a blueprint for the district’s next step. The review requested by the district was to be based solely on statistical data, with no independent “on the ground” research at the Prime Six schools, said professor Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project. However, it does outline statistical patterns and their possible implications, and poses questions “the district needs to answer to be sure that the students get a fair chance and the neighborhood has a good future,” Orfield said.

By extension, the lessons learned in the Prime Six program may be applied to the School District’s effort to promote a version of open enrollment districtwide: Are parents eager or even willing to send their children to schools outside their neighborhoods?