CCSD officials, business execs seek best practices in how schools spend

By Ian Whitaker

Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2015 | 9:15 p.m.

Although they are only a block away from each other, Quannah McCall and Marion Cahlan Edison elementary schools in North Las Vegas are worlds apart.

Cahlan went from being a three-star school in 2013 to a four-star school last year, improving in nearly every area of the Nevada School Performance Framework. McCall, however, fell from three stars to two.

In the past, it was hard for the Clark County School District to pinpoint exactly why. Not anymore, according to Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky.

Skorkowsky announced Wednesday that he and district officials have been poring over mountains of spending and academic data with local business leaders to figure out how schools are using their money and which ones are recording the biggest improvements.

To put it another way, they’ve been doing a return-on-investment analysis, going line by line through budgets at each school in the county.

“I knew personally that I was not the best person to do that,” Skorkowksy said before a crowd of CCSD officials inside the Cahlan school library. “I had a good sense of our budget, but I needed to involve the community in this process.”

The impetus for the study came out of Skorkowsky’s Executive Advisory Group last spring, where local business leaders have a fair share of seats at the table. It includes representatives from the Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce, local tech company Switch, and the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance. Subcommittees recently formed to help with the study also include representatives from Wells Fargo, Wynn Resorts and the Bank of Nevada.

In addition to the general dissatisfaction with underperforming schools among valley residents, local business groups have taken a renewed interest in improving education in Clark County. Recent studies have shown that Nevada lacks a sufficiently educated workforce, which puts a damper on economic growth in burgeoning industries like health care and information technology.

“The goal was nothing less than shifting the way that we do business … and striving to show how every dollar supports the work in the classrooms,” Skorkowsky said.

They are doing that by assigning three committees to examine costs and outcomes for the district’s schools, programs and departments. The data that is being used in the analysis has always been around, but it’s now being applied in new ways.

Glenn Christenson, former LVGEA president, co-chairs the CCSD committee tasked with studying how the district’s academic programs are being implemented at schools.

In one example, they take the cost to educate students in a given program and the cost to educate students who aren’t in the program, and then look at how each group performs on standardized tests. If the students in the program consistently perform better each year and the cost of the program is deemed reasonable, the district is seeing a return on the investment.

The same model is used by the committees studying each individual school and each department.

The studies have yielded only preliminary data so far, which will be released this summer. They are currently being peer-reviewed by national experts, the district said.

In the long term, the district hopes the data will illuminate good practices in successful schools so that they can be replicated elsewhere.

Christenson said the school-by-school results would likely not surprise critics.

His committee has already identified one major area where CCSD is inefficient: paperwork. There’s too much of it, he said, when most businesses would be computerizing records and making it easier to record data.

But in the end, a study is just a study, Christenson said, and any changes have to come from the top.

“Pat’s going to have to insist that these things happen,” he said.