North Las Vegas launches program to help parents make educational choices

North Las Vegas recently launched an initiative to help connect parents with educational opportunities for their children.

The pilot program, which essentially amounts to an education call center, began this month and is expanding, the city said.

Staff at the call center can help parents identify what they think is most important for their child, then connect them with a school that best suits their needs.

The program is part of a broader slate of education initiatives the city is planning to roll out over coming months.

“Our council has long recognized the inequities in education in North Las Vegas, and it’s always been a concern, but the pandemic shined a huge spotlight on how critical the situation was,” Assistant City Manager Delen Goldberg said.

The city sees the goal of the initiatives, collectively called LearnNLV, as providing high-quality education to every child in North Las Vegas. Other aspects of the effort include launching additional charter schools and expanding the Southern Nevada Urban Micro Academy.

But the effort, Goldberg said, is not intended to undercut any other education system, such as the Clark County School District.

“We’re looking to work with everybody in the community because that’s the only way an effort like this is going to pay off,” she said.

As for the call center initiative, services will be offered in English and Spanish, and staffers will walk parents through various options for schools. Once a viable option is identified, staff can help parents get their children enrolled.

If a child might be more successful at another public school within the city, the center could help that parent submit a zone variance request, Goldberg said.

City Manager Ryann Juden said there is a clear need for a program that can help parents who are trying to figure out what is best for their kids.

“I think that one of the things we learned in the pandemic, when parents were trying to figure out what to do, there was just a lot of education and information that was lacking that our parents needed to get,” he said.

Councilwoman Pamela Goynes-Brown said the program seeks to provide answers to questions that some might not have thought to ask.

“It’s just very important to be educated on the ins and outs of the whole system and what it’s designed to accomplish,” she said.

A phone number for the program — 702-625-9715 — is set to be live by Tuesday. A web page for the effort is expected to launch late next week.

Contact Blake Apgar at bapgar @reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5298. Follow @blakeapgar on Twitter.