Organizational teams seek place to complain during CCSD reorganization

As school organizational teams face funding roadblocks or issues with principals or officials during the Clark County School District’s state-mandated reorganization, they’re struggling to find where to lodge concerns.

“We don’t know where to get this resolved,” Courtney Sweetin, a nonvoting member of the school organizational team at Virgin Valley Elementary School in Mesquite, said Monday to a group of lawmakers serving as an advisory committee for the reorganization.

Sweetin had a funding issue, but her where-can-we-turn theme was repeated by several other public speakers during Monday’s meeting. It was the first time in six months the advisory committee has met to discuss the mammoth process, which is pushing more decision making in the nation’s fifth-largest school district to school sites.

Nobody seemed to have a clear answer.

Glenn Christenson, chairman of the community implementation council for the reorganization, said it was critical for organizational teams to have a central place to air concerns.

“These complaints that we’re hearing, I think, are important. It’s going to take some time to work through these problems,” he said.

Sweetin’s issue is that the rural school is being underfunded $100,000 this year. The school has tried to resolve this with the district, but in the meantime the school will be starting the year short a kindergarten teacher.

“This is not the way anybody wants to go,” she said.

District Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky said some issues aired Monday were part of complying with the reorganization. In previous years, some rural schools were given extra teacher positions that weren’t justified by student enrollment. Skorkowsky called those “gifts.”

Those are going away, partly because Skorkowsky would have to pull from another school to keep funding the “gifts.”

Skorkowsky said officials were dealing with other issues raised case by case.

Contact Meghin Delaney at 702-383-0281 or mdelaney@reviewjournal.com. Follow @MeghinDelaney on Twitter.