Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Senate bill could mean new Clark County schools

Maureen Cotton-Rex Bell Elementary School

Christopher DeVargas

Maureen Cotton teaches her fourth-grade class at Rex Bell Elementary School on Friday, Sept. 19, 2014, in Las Vegas.

Education advocates are one step closer to their first victory of the legislative session.

On Monday the state Senate passed SB119 along to the Assembly for final approval. The bill would renew Nevada school districts’ ability to raise public money to build new schools and renovate existing facilities.

While the Senate legislation was largely overshadowed by a partisan debate about prevailing wages for the construction workers building those schools, the development is nothing but good news for education officials.

In Clark County, overcrowding was recently cited by Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky as one of the district’s most pressing concerns. Construction has been mostly on hold since 2008, when CCSD’s previous bond authority expired. In 2012, county voters struck down a ballot item to renew that authority.

That has forced the district to scramble to find space for a student population that continues to grow. Total enrollment this year sits at a record 319,000 students, up from 318,000 in 2013 and 314,000 the year before that.

The current legislation would allow districts to extend construction bonds for another 10 years without going back to voters.

CCSD really wants the money to build new schools. But where it will build them, and what it will build, could be a whole new issue.

According to documents recently released by the district, officials are planning to build seven new elementary schools by the start of the 2017-2018 school year if the bond rollover is approved.

Five of those schools will be built on the west and southwest fringes of the valley in communities like Summerlin, Mountain’s Edge, Southern Highlands and Spring Valley. The last two will be built in North Las Vegas and near Lake Las Vegas.

“These are some of our hotspot areas,” said district deputy CFO Jim McIntosh. “We need to respond to growth in these areas.”

In 2018, the district plans to finish three additional elementary schools in the south valley and one in the far northwest.

Each of these “shovel-ready” projects will cost around $30 million, for a total cost of around $350 million, according to the district.

Elementary schools are a high priority because they are more prone to overcrowding than middle schools and high schools, which can generally accommodate more students.

“It’s our one level where we are over capacity as a whole,” McIntosh said.

The district has enrolled over 1,000 elementary students just since the start of December. At the current rate of growth, McIntosh said the district needed to build two elementary schools each year just to keep up. Sixty-one schools out of the district's 217 are currently classified as overcrowded.

While the new schools certainly would help, McIntosh said CCSD really needed 32 more elementary schools to eliminate overcrowding altogether. If the bond rollover is approved, CCSD officials estimate it would take six months to figure out finances before they can break ground.

“From the district perspective, time is very important,” said district lobbyist Joyce Haldeman. “It would enable us to get working on this immediately.”

Administrators are banking on the bill making it out of the Legislature by the end of March, if not sooner. Any later than that, they say, and the district would be forced to delay opening the seven schools until January of 2018, halfway through the school year.

“It’s drastic, it’s hectic,” McIntosh said. “But we’ve done it before.”

In the state Assembly, education advocates are expecting the partisan fervor over the prevailing wage issue to resume once again.

While the Senate bill passed comfortably despite a party line vote, the debate in the Assembly is expected to be complicated by some rural Republicans who feel the state shouldn’t approve a measure voted down by taxpayers three years ago.

Below is a rough estimation of where CCSD plans to start building schools if the Legislature renews its bond authority. Dark orange markers represent the location of schools planned to open in August 2017. Light orange markers are schools planned to open in August 2018. Current district plans only reference cross streets, so the final location of the schools could be different.

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