Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

EDUCATION:

Teachers on front lines offer ideas to fix troubled schools

Doug Jydstrup: Government, Cimmaron-Memorial High; has taught for 40 years.

Doug Jydstrup: Government, Cimmaron-Memorial High; has taught for 40 years.

Jennifer Webb-Cook: Special education, Bass Elementary; has taught for 20 years.

Jennifer Webb-Cook: Special education, Bass Elementary; has taught for 20 years.

Pam Avdoian: Physical education, Bridger Middle; has taught for 31 years.

Pam Avdoian: Physical education, Bridger Middle; has taught for 31 years.

Ed Smalley Jr.: History, Rancho High; has taught for 31 years.

Ed Smalley Jr.: History, Rancho High; has taught for 31 years.

Bonnie Johnson: Elementary school psychologist at several schools in Las Vegas.

Bonnie Johnson: Elementary school psychologist at several schools in Las Vegas.

Once upon a time, “Room 222,” a television show about a troubled high school, attracted a national audience. The veteran teacher was handsome. The beginning teacher was perky. The principal was gruff. The theme song had a flute.

Ed Smalley Jr., now 60 and white-haired, was in teachers college when “Room 222” was in its heyday in the 1970s. He now teaches history at Rancho High School

“I saw that,” Smalley recalled, “and I said, ‘Wow, that’s what I’m going to do.’

“Guess what? A half-hour TV show isn’t reality.”

He added: “If I had scriptwriters writing for me, I’d have had a wonderful career. They solve everything.”

Last week, four teachers with more than a century of classroom experience — 122 years, to be exact, 31 just for Smalley — gathered in a room.

They spent nearly two hours talking about how to fix Clark County’s troubled schools.

The district’s problems are familiar.

Even when the economy was booming, parents working night shifts were distracted from helping their children in school. Crowded homes and apartments hurt education, too.

Now, many parents are unemployed or underemployed, or working two, sometimes three, jobs and coming home exhausted. Many students are unprepared, lacking basic study skills and fluency in English.

About half of all students don’t graduate from high school.

And soon to aggravate the effects of old budget cuts is another looming crisis in public spending.

The state’s more than $6.5 billion budget for 2011-13 may have a $3 billion deficit. About $2.6 billion now goes to K-12 education.

The four teachers were brought together by the Clark County Education Association, the union that represents most of the district’s 18,000 teachers.

The teachers — and a psychologist who works with teachers— proposed real-world solutions.

Pam Avdoian, 53, a physical education teacher at Jim Bridger Middle School in North Las Vegas, has taught for 31 years.

She proposes getting rid of the state proficiency examination, the requirement for a high school diploma. Every March, students must pass tests in mathematics, reading, science and writing.

“If they pass the courses that lead up to the test, they should graduate,” she said.

Similarly, Smalley, the history teacher, would dump standardized evaluations of student performance that are common in national evaluation requirements, such as those of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Teachers end up teaching to a test, putting more emphasis on test-taking skills, he said, than actual knowledge. And teachers’ jobs hang in the balance.

Other teachers in the room agreed that such tests pit city against city and state against state in a competition to keep school funding or teachers’ jobs or even to keep a school from closing, rather than focusing on what is important — the individual students.

“We could customize” school evaluations “down to the local level, even down to district or a neighborhood or even a school,” Smalley said. “The Nevada Department of Education could review them to see if they’re good.”

Doug Jydstrup, 62, a teaching veteran of 40 years, teaches advanced placement government at Cimarron-Memorial High School. (Students finishing advanced-placement classes take standardized tests, and good grades can earn them college credit.)

Jydstrup proposes a “boot camp” high school for undisciplined students. “Have real disciplinarian teachers and let them go to it,” he said. “That would help a lot of other children” whose educations are disrupted by problem pupils.

Jennifer Webb-Cook, 57, is a special-education teacher at John C. Bass Elementary School. She has taught for 20 years.

Webb-Cook proposes more vocational and technical education, not just at magnet schools, but also at most of the district’s more than 350 schools.

“If I’m not going to be an attorney, maybe I can make something out of wood, and sell it to furniture companies.”

Alison Turner, president of the Nevada Parent Teacher Association, which has 20,000 members statewide, was sympathetic to the teacher comments.

“These are creative solutions,” she said in an interview. “But career and technical education costs money.”

Eliminating the state proficiency exam is something some educators have discussed as part of the “core standards” movement toward a uniform set of education benchmarks.

But any tailor-made evaluation at the local level may pose problems, she said. “You never know whether you’re comparing apples to apples,” Turner said.

Superintendent Walt Rulffes reacted similarly to Turner.

“I concur that the we seem to OD on tests,” Rulffes said in an e-mail message, “but we now serve a community of Gen X parents and policymakers who want accountability and quantifiable data to support it. It’s woven through the federal and state laws. It’s mandated — get used to it — it’s not only here to stay, but will likely increase.”

And a boot camp high school might seem attractive, he wrote. It “may be favored by some parents — especially for other people’s children.

“I think the real problem here, though, is class sizes. When teachers have a manageable number of children, behavior is a part of the educational process. For the most serious problems, though, an out-of-school placement is appropriate.”

For all the teachers, the most worrisome trend is the lack of basic preparation they see in students.

Bonnie Johnson, 56, the school psychologist, tests students at several schools to see whether they qualify for special-education classes.

“The children we’re seeing are street-wise but deficient in school skills,” Johnson said. “Why are they deficient? There’s nobody at home to enforce that they need to be studying. Teachers have to take their place now.”

And budget cuts have had unintended consequences. Physical education classes are now spotty, and students can sometimes go a year or more with no classes, according to Avdoian.

Not one Bridger student — whether skinny, overweight or in-between — passed the eighth-grade physical fitness class last year, she said.

“I tell children all the time,” Avdoian said, “I’m old enough to be your grandmother. I’m overweight. I’ve had children. I’ve had knee surgery. I shouldn’t be able to outrun you.”

The classroom has changed. When the teachers started as recently as the 1970s, all they needed was a blackboard, chalk, textbooks and students’ desks.

Now it’s computers that teachers said are essential to modern instruction.

If more parents used computers with their children, bonds between them would grow, which would help teachers.

Webb-Cook said: “Kids are so happy when parents have the time to work with them, to ask them how was your day? Are you learning multiplication? Let me show you how I did it when I was in school. It works for little children and teenagers, too”

But reality always intrudes.

“The big rub in the climate is spending cuts,” Smalley said. “Does the public want an education? We can do a cheap education. But you get what you pay for.”

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