‘They don’t care about an education’: Concerns arise about CCSD behavioral school

During a joint meeting of the Senate Committee on Education and Senate Committee on Judiciary last month, Sen. Dina Neal, D-North Las Vegas, alluded to issues at Peterson Academic Center as district Superintendent Jesus Jara and Police Chief Henry Blackeye addressed questions from lawmakers about the department’s use-of-force policies.

Neal said what’s going on at Peterson is a problem, noting there was a “massive brawl” on campus a few weeks earlier.

“The school in and of itself has no proper supervision going on,” she said.

Peterson is among three Clark County School District behavioral schools. The centers — which each host sixth through 12th graders under one roof — are a short-term placement for students who have a disciplinary infraction and have been referred there from their home school.

Cherri Mims said she has never seen a school like Peterson Academic Center. Her 11-year-old grandson Adrian Quigley has been in about 20 fights since January at the behavioral school and has suffered injuries to his lip and nose and received sprained fingers.

Mims said it’s unacceptable and that her grandson — whom she’s raising — doesn’t go to school to get beaten up. She pushed for weeks trying to get him transferred out of the Centennial Hills campus.

Finally, last week, she told the school she didn’t want her grandson on campus anymore and that she only wanted him to do schoolwork from home.

“They don’t care about an education there,” she said.

Jara said he didn’t want to comment on an individual incident at the school. Peterson Principal Michael Sharapan didn’t return a request for comment Thursday.

‘No education happening’

At Peterson, Neal said there’s a safety risk on all sides — for students and employees — and “the fact that there’s no education happening at all.”

She alleged that there are no licensed teachers at the school and that students sit in the lunchroom all day.

The school has 13 licensed teachers and two vacancies, with a long-term substitute filling one of the positions, the district said in a statement to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. All of the teachers listed on the school’s website are licensed, according to a Nevada Department of Education database.

In response to a Review-Journal inquiry about what’s being done to address fighting at Peterson and what security measures are in place, the district responded with a statement that’s identical to the mission statement on the school’s website.

“The mission of Peterson Student Success Center is to create a safe, secure environment where high interest lessons promote academic achievement while incorporating positive behavioral interventions to promote social growth in an effort to provide students with the knowledge and skills to be successful in the comprehensive school setting and throughout life,” the district wrote.

The district didn’t provide information about what circumstances might lead to a student being referred to a behavioral center and how long they stay.

The Review-Journal filed a public records request on March 3 for the number of calls for school police service at each district middle and high school, including Peterson. That request is still pending.

Staffing issues

Mims said she had spoken with a district administrator earlier this school year and asked him to take her grandson out of the school.

The school’s response to issues on campus, she said, has been that they don’t have enough staff. “That’s all I hear,” Mims said.

The school district is facing a teacher and support staff shortage. Employees have raised concerns for many months about working conditions, including a heavy workload, large class sizes and school violence.

It’s a challenge to recruit teachers in the urban core of Las Vegas, Jara said during last month’s legislative hearing, noting that attempts to try to incentivize educators to move there fell flat because of “different things.”

He said that as superintendent, he cannot transfer teachers to certain schools like his colleagues at other urban school districts because of Assembly Bill 469, the state’s reorganization law that passed during the 2017 session.

The law aims to give more control to individual schools in the nation’s fifth-largest district, which has more than 300,000 students, in areas such as staffing and budgeting.

During the legislative hearing, Neal asked if Jara was saying the status of what’s happening at Peterson Academic Center was going to remain the way it is.

“Senator Neal, I am just as concerned as you are,” Jara said. He pointed to the reorganization law, saying he doesn’t have the ability to place teachers at the campus.

Jara told legislators he’s extremely concerned that one of the district’s smaller elementary schools, which he didn’t name, has eight licensed educators and the rest are substitutes.

But the superintendent didn’t specifically address staffing levels at Peterson.

As of Thursday, the school district’s hiring website advertises five licensed positions at Peterson Academic Center — three teachers, a counselor and a social worker — for next school year.

In response to a Review-Journal question about how it’s addressing the staffing shortage at the school, the district said it “continues to recruit in a variety of ways including reaching out to students in college across the country and attending job fairs in other areas.”

The district also pointed to its move to raise starting teacher pay to $50,115 this school year, a relocation bonus for new teachers and efforts to grow its own teacher pipelines.

But Neal, who was on a reorganization committee for two years, said that while AB 469 took power away from central administration to do certain things, “this is a safety concern.”

She told Jara that if he’s trying to tell her the law stripped the school district’s power to manage safety, “I would disagree and I would argue.”

‘Fight, fight, fight’

Adrian, Mims’ grandson, arrived at Peterson Academic Center on Jan. 26, with his last day slated for April 14.

During his time at Cadwallader Middle School, he made a comment to a teacher about knowing which car she drives, which the teacher interpreted as a threat, according to Mims. He was subsequently suspended and referred to Peterson.

The school has approximately 127 students — well below the program’s capacity of 334 students — but numbers fluctuate throughout the school year.

In 2016, the Clark County School Board voted to close three of the district’s behavioral schools, citing low enrollment.

Adrian said in early March that older students at Peterson start the fights — “they’re all older than me” — but that he hadn’t been fighting in the past two weeks.

Mims said her grandson doesn’t mingle with that crowd of children, noting they’re too rough and rowdy.

Later that month, Mims said she found her grandson on the ground at the school bus stop and she took him to an urgent care center.

His lip had been busted in a fight, he was vomiting and kept trying to go to sleep, but didn’t suffer a concussion, she said.

At school, fights happen mostly during a seventh-period physical education class, Mims said. She also said she once witnessed four girls slap-boxing on campus, and an employee had to try to intervene.

“That’s all those kids do there is fight, fight, fight,” she said.

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