Ten years ago, former Assm. David Gardner (R-Las Vegas) had a plan to solve long-standing issues at Clark County schools: Break up the nation’s fifth-largest school district. 

His 2015 bill laid the groundwork for what became known as the 2017 reorganization bill, AB469, which broke up the school district without really breaking it up. The reorganization was lawmakers’ answer to community members who have — and continue to — argue that the district has grown too large and should be broken up into smaller, more manageable entities. 

Instead, the bill made individual schools their own precincts and shifted more budgeting and decision-making power away from the district’s central offices to school organizational teams (SOTs) composed of school administrators, staff, parents, community members and students. 

“The original purpose was that the school district's too big and the way it's working isn't functional, and the parents really have no say,” Gardner said in a phone interview last Wednesday. “The big belief of that bill was, the more power you give to parents, people who care the most for their kids, you're probably going to get a better result.”

The 2017 legislation was crafted with input from lawmakers, school district officials, community members and education leaders such as Clark County Education Association (CCEA) Executive Director John Vellardita, who at one point called the 2017 legislation a “game changer.”

But eight years later, two bills by Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas), who voted in favor of the 2017 bill, and Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo propose suspending or removing parts of the reorganization law altogether as part of their broader school accountability efforts that include removal of principals and superintendents and greater oversight of school boards. 

This legislative session, CCEA is working with Cannizzaro to overhaul the reorganization and restore control back to school district leadership, prompted by the union’s concerns of schools building “nest eggs” with unspent funds that are carried forward to the next budget period, known as carryover funds. Critics called Cannizzaro’s bill a de facto repeal of the law, saying it would strip authority from principal and SOTs, making the teams obsolete. 

Vellardita said the reorganization has not produced the results it was designed to achieve, citing the school district’s low math and English language arts proficiency rates, even though the law didn’t include a mechanism to track whether its achieving this indirect goal.  

He also took issue with the nearly half billion dollars that Clark County schools have in total in carryover dollars, or roughly an eighth of the district’s projected $4 billion for next year, though the amounts each school has can vary. 

“The intent behind the reorg is with control of the funding … there would be better outcomes, and we just simply have not seen that,” Vellardita said in a phone interview last Thursday. 

A rocky implementation 

Under the 2017 law, the Clark County School District (CCSD) has to trickle 85 percent of its funds down to schools so SOTs that are closer to ground can spend the money as they see fit to meet their school’s unique needs.

But district policy red tape, which was meant to serve as a check on frivolous school spending, has limited SOTs’ spending power more than Gardner expected. 

“We wanted there to be a cooler head at central to have a say, but … I didn't expect them to just say no and just kind of freeze the money,” he said. 

Coupled with unspent dollars from unfilled teacher positions, positions filled by substitute teachers, projects that never took off because of staffing shortages and long procurement processes, plus an influx of COVID relief funds, has all contributed to schools’ carryover funds ballooning over the years. 

“It was extremely misleading from the executive director of CCEA to present that as something that was happening at schools, and the implication that schools were hoarding it or or somehow not spending the money on kids was completely misleading,” Gardner said of Vellardita’s testimony during the May 19 hearing of Cannizzaro’s bill. 

Rebecca Dirks Garcia, a parent who serves as chair for two SOTs and administrator of the popular CCSD Parents Facebook group, said some schools also prefer to build a cushion in their budgets because they don’t trust the district.

Last year, some schools were able to use their reserves to make their budgets whole after the district made mistakes that put some of them in the red. 

The reorganization law had also aimed to give principals more say over personnel hirings, but Jeff Horn, executive director of the Clark County Association of School Administrators and Professional-Technical Employees, said those components were never fully implemented and have been further constrained by teacher and support staff contract agreements. 

“The law continued to be tightened up and changed every single session since that, and it's always limited, little by little, the principal's autonomy to make impactful decisions,” Horn said in a phone interview last Thursday. “That's hurt schools and student growth.”

Dirks Garcia adds that the pandemic has also made it hard to judge what benefit, if any, the reorganization has had on students’ academic performance. 

But Vellardita argues that enough key components of the reorganization law have been implemented, and says COVID is no longer an excuse for poor academic performance, especially when the district received $1.2 billion in total in COVID relief funds. 

“We don’t buy that argument … and apologists that try to make that case are just harming a student’s education,” he said. 

Shifting power to district leadership

Lombardo’s education bill, AB584, would suspend the authority of SOTs if a principal performs poorly on their evaluation and would allow the state superintendent of public instruction to give budgeting control back to the school district. Another provision would also allow the state superintendent to suspend parts of the reorganization law if the school is deemed chronically underperforming and requires state intervention to correct issues. (The state superintendent has said half of the state’s schools are underperforming.) 

“It does not make sense to take the budgeting power away from a school and give it back to [Clark County School District]’s central office when the budget crisis last fall put them under a state-appointed compliance monitor due to poor budgetary practices,” said Ed Gonzalez, the vice chair for the school organization team at Liliam Lujan Hickey Elementary School in East Las Vegas who previously worked as a policy analyst for the Nevada Assembly and was a lobbyist for CCEA, in a Friday statement on AB584. He was neutral on the bill during its May 22 hearing. 

A proposed amendment to Cannizzaro’s bill goes even further and would cut parts of the reorganization law that gives schools authority over the selection of staff and full control over their budgets. It would also allow the school district to force schools to use their carry forward funds on needs such as tutoring, extracurricular activities and programs to support social and emotional learning. 

It also gives the superintendent greater control over the selection of a new principal. Currently, an SOT can reject the superintendent’s selected candidate if 75 percent of the SOT members present at the time of the vote elect to do so. 

Gardner said the proposed amendment is more or less a repeal of the reorganization law.

“I agree that that money is supposed to be helping kids now. My problem is, you're blaming the wrong people,” he said. “If CCSD … would let these schools spend the money, I can guarantee you that they'd spend the money.”

CCSD said in a Wednesday statement its “work with legislators to understand the intent of the bills." 

The legislation comes two years after CCEA worked with Sen. Rochelle Nguyen (D-Las Vegas) to pass SB282, which limits how the funds schools can carry forward as an effort to get schools to spend down their reserves on student needs such as tutoring, social and emotional learning programs and extracurriculars before the majority would be swept up in a state education rainy fund account rather than “hoarding so-called carryover dollars in perpetuity” as the union stated in a 2023 document. 

Vellardita said an overhaul of the reorganization law is necessary as lawmakers contemplate adding greater scrutiny on underperforming schools and district officials. 

“How can you hold a superintendent, how can you hold trustees accountable for performance if you don't control what's going on in those schools?” Vellardita asked. “The way I would present it is, it's a right sizing of alignment of resources, outcomes and accountability.”

In addition, Vellardita said he thinks there’s enough firewalls built into the entire bill and amendment to prevent the school district or school board from abusing their power. 

Gardner isn’t as trusting.

“I love Jhone, she’s awesome,” said Gardner, who recently worked as a senior deputy attorney general for the state and represented the Nevada Department of Education, of CCSD’s new superintendent, Jhone Ebert. “My problem with the idea of just trusting one superintendent is, who's the next one and who's the next one after that? I'm really concerned … because we have not had a great string of them.”