Deaf pupils in danger of losing their school

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The organizers of the Las Vegas Charter School for the Deaf spent more than six years raising enough money to lease a facility, finally opening the school in fall 2008.

Now the program’s future is at risk because the building it shares is up for sale.

The owner of Creative Kids Learning Center, at North Tenaya Way and Westcliff Drive, has offered to sell the 7,300 square-foot building for $1 million (20 percent down). But that’s far beyond the means of the modest charter school, which recently finished its first year of operation with three students and expects an enrollment of seven in the fall.

“We’ve had a lot of people offer suggestions and advice,” said Caroline Bass, who serves as secretary of the charter school’s board and is lead instructor of the interpreter preparation and deaf studies program at the College of Southern Nevada. “What we don’t have yet is someone willing to step in, buy the building as an investment and lease it back to us.”

Public schools are required by law to provide services for all children with disabilities. Some of Clark County’s deaf and partially deaf students are in mainstream classrooms with interpreters, and others are grouped together at certain campuses.

The charter school offers “bilingual-bicultural education,” a model followed by many of the nation’s top schools for the deaf. Teachers are fluent in American Sign Language, and students also learn to read and write in English.

More information is available at lvcsd.org.

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Special education students and campuses serving the poorest neighborhoods will benefit from tens of millions of dollars in extra funding over the next two years, thanks to the federal stimulus package. But the money will also mean a doubling of bookkeeping responsibilities for the Clark County School District.

The special education division and the Title I office (which oversees federal money for students from low-income households) have been warned by the feds that there can be no co-mingling of the “regular” special ed and Title I funds with the stimulus money, which means setting up a separate accounting system.

On Thursday the Clark County School Board approved a list of 68 campuses that are to share $57 million in stimulus Title I funding over the next two years. That’s in addition to the 83 campuses that will receive “regular” Title I support.

Susan Wright, director of Title I services for the district, said her small staff is bracing for a near doubling of the number of schools it supervises. With the help of Wright’s office, Clark County principals are busy drafting budgets to reduce class sizes, extend instructional days and teacher training, and make sure every possible dollar is correctly allocated.

“We don’t want to give any money back to the federal government,” Wright said.

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A 13-year-old Arizona girl’s rights were violated when she was forced to submit to a strip-search by school officials in Safford, Ariz., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The incident took place in 2003, when middle school honor student Savana Redding had to strip to her underwear and bra and shake out both garments to prove she hadn’t concealed prescription strength ibuprofen pills.

The Clark County School District’s regulation clearly spells out that when conducting a search, “school personnel may not require students to expose intimate undergarments or skin normally covered ... except in extraordinary circumstances when necessary to avoid an immediate threat or danger to safety, welfare or health, and less intrusive means are not practical.”

Bill Hoffman, senior counsel for the district, said the language is in keeping with the Supreme Court’s ruling, which upheld the school’s right to search the student’s outer clothing.

“Our policy on strip-searches is that we don’t do them,” Hoffman said. “Under the circumstances that occurred in Safford, we wouldn’t have done what they did.”