District sets boundaries for West Middle School

     Review-Journal
      The Clark County school board voted unanimously Thursday to approve attendance boundaries for the new West Middle School.
      The school is the first middle school in the west Las Vegas area, and as such, local activists wanted to ensure neighborhood children would attend it. They got their wish, with the boundaries set from Rancho Drive to the Union Pacific Railroad and from Carey Avenue to U.S. Highway 95.
      The lines also affect Swainston Middle School, which will receive pupils who live between Cheyenne Avenue and Carey and from Tonopah Drive to Martin Luther King Boulevard, and O'Callaghan Middle School, which gets pupils who live between Cheyenne and Gowan Road and between the railroad and Lamb Boulevard.
      The board also voted to open Lied and Keller middle schools with eighth-grade classes -- but not West. That decision pleased parents of incoming eighth graders at West's surrounding schools who feared their children would have to spend their last year of middle school at a new school.
      Zoning director Dusty Dickens said West would not be able to handle eighth-grade pupils without being crowded. By the 1998-99 school year, when West does have an eighth grade, another middle school is scheduled to open in northwest Las Vegas to relieve expected crowding.