Mackey academy evolves into CCSD’s only K-8 campus

Graduating fifth graders at Mackey iLead Academy for the Digital Sciences in North Las Vegas will no longer have to worry about making the sometimes rough transition to middle school.

That’s because they have the option of staying at the school for three more years now that Mackey is the Clark County School District’s only kindergarten-through-eighth-grade campus.

The goal behind the change, which occurred with the beginning of the current school year, is to eliminate a transition for students with the hope that they’ll be more successful and face fewer barriers as they continue their education.

“The reason we believe it’s better is it eliminates one of the crucial transitions in a child’s educational career,” Principal Kemala Washington told the Review-Journal.

Washington, who has been the school’s principal for 16 years, said parents often told her at fifth grade graduation ceremonies that they wished their child could stay at the school instead of transitioning to a middle school.

The idea of making it a reality struck her in a meeting about rebuilding Mackey’s school building several years ago.

“Well, maybe this would be an opportunity to see if we could do a middle school here,” she recalls thinking.

New building awaits students

The new school building at the Englestad Street campus was completed in August, but students haven’t been there yet because all education is being done remotely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This school year, Mackey iLead Academy is operating with kindergarten through sixth grades. The school received nine new job positions in its budget to accommodate the expansion.

The school will add one grade each year until it reaches eighth grade. At that point, it will have 90 students in each of the middle school grade levels.

The school district, which has more than 307,000 students and approximately 360 schools, has no plans to expand the K-8 model, but it applauded Washington’s vision in a statement to the Review-Journal.

“The collaboration and innovation exhibited by Principal Washington and her school community is a testament to the leadership and neighborhood support we have in the Clark County School District,” the district said. “With the support of Trustee (Linda) Young and Superintendent (Jesus) Jara, Principal Washington was able to bring this new education model to life in order to support the education needs of her students and their families.”

Parent Malika Braggs has a daughter in sixth grade at Mackey and a son who graduated from the school and is now a high school freshman. Braggs also has a toddler and hopes she’ll be able to attend Mackey when it’s time for kindergarten.

Braggs said she was excited when the school sent out a survey to parents seeking input on a proposal to expand through middle school.

“I thought it was an awesome idea,” she said, adding that she wishes the change had occurred sooner so her son could have stayed through middle school, too.

“I totally think the transition from elementary to middle school is way more drastic than the transition from middle school to high school,” Braggs said.

An old concept

Kindergarten-through-eighth- grade schools aren’t a new concept, but they are far less common than they were many decades ago.

Elementary schools that ran through eighth grade were prevalent until the early 1900s. The movement to create junior high schools serving either seventh and eighth grades or seventh, eighth and ninth grades came in response to enrollment growth.

Sometime in the 1960s, another trend caught on: middle schools, a grouping of the sixth through eighth grades.

Mackey isn’t the only K-8 campus in Clark County. The model is used at some local private schools and public charter schools. Some campuses even accommodate students from kindergarten through high school.

Mackey, which was built 56 years ago, has undergone a number of name changes and other transitions over the decades. Those include being a so-called “neighborhood school” with an attendance zone that drew students who lived close to campus and a magnet school with an emphasis on “multiple intelligences,” a theory that divides human intelligence into specific “modalities of intelligence” rather than defining it as a single, general ability.

When Washington became principal in 2004, a new magnet school theme, global leadership, had just been selected for Mackey, and she was charged with implementing it.

The emphasis on leading turned out to be a good fit.

“This is what we believe makes our kids so different,” she said.

In fall 2018, Clark County School Board trustee Young was holding meetings at different schools in her region and one of them was at Mackey iLead Academy. The morning of the meeting, Washington received a phone call saying Jara — who was new on the job — would be in attendance.

School parents attended the meeting in “great number” because they wanted to share their desire for Mackey to be a K-8 school, Washington said.

She approached Jara after he gave remarks to the parents and told him the parents wanted to talk with him specifically about the desire for a K-8 school.

“My parents just started asking him direct questions,” Washington said. “They just started telling him more about our school and really pinning him down” about his thoughts on K-8 schools.

From there, Washington said, the ball kept rolling until the school got final approval.

An unusual school year

The COVID-19 pandemic has made this school year an unusual one at Mackey and the rest of the CCSD.

The school district did the best it could with training to prepare for distance learning, including on the online learning management system Canvas, before the school year, but “It was still not near enough to prepare teachers for what we were asking them to do,” she said.

Washington said it was a tough transition for teachers but by mid-October, “They were flying with this (new system).”

Student attendance during distance learning has been wonderful and students are engaged with their teachers, Washington said, but some students have not been completing their school work.

Another challenge: Home isn’t the best place for a lot of children, she said. When some of the students unmute their computer microphone during a class session via video and you hear the background noise, “It would break your heart.”

The strength of the teaching staff to power ahead through the pandemic has been one big bright spot, Washington said.

“I’m just amazed at my teachers,” she said. “I’m amazed and in awe of who they are.”

Contact Julie Wootton-Greener at jgreener@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2921. Follow @julieswootton on Twitter.