COLUMN: Ken Ward

Getting bigger, not better

The Clark County School District predicts its enrollment will top 400,000 by 2011. "It's staggering," said one concerned official. And that's not the half of it.

Though the projected 60 percent increase is surely daunting, the more significant story is where those new bodies are coming from. Backing away from a politically explosive subject, the district says it doesn't have a clue. But we can make some educated estimates based on what's happened during the past decade.

In the 1990s, Clark County's school system became a majority minority district -- and that trend is accelerating. While the share of white enrollment declined by one-third to 47.7 percent, record waves of immigrants boosted Hispanics from 12 percent to more than 30 percent. The number of English Language Learner (bilingual) students nearly tripled in just the past five years.

Because Latino families are younger and more fecund than their Caucasian and black counterparts, the Hispanic baby boom is escalating. On top of that, porous borders, low-skill casino jobs and federal mandates that all students must be served fuel the flow of illegals (whom the district says it doesn't even track).

Because Hispanic parents are less educated than the general population, their children struggle in the classroom. Their dropout rates are higher and test scores are lower -- all of which retard district performance. Special programs, which siphon ever more tax dollars, expand in an endless effort to cater to the needs of the poorest students.

Transience is also a problem. Each January, many of our most crowded inner-city campuses empty out as pupils sojourn back to Mexico and points south. That their winter hiatus is excused by the district is no surprise. After all, the school district designates parts of two months -- September and October -- for a Hispanic celebration. Blacks (February), Native Americans (November) and Asian-Pacific islanders (March) get only one month apiece. European stock hailing from Ireland to Poland need none because they're in charge, right?

Multiculturalism is an article of faith for educrats, and the rapidly growing Hispanic community has become the holy grail. Last month, U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige conducted a town hall meeting for Latinos here. The agenda: improving Hispanic education.

But that didn't satisfy the political nymphomanics who complained that Paige and Jorge Bush aren't doing enough to address "the roots of the problems." Though those "roots" were never defined, the message was clear: Give us more programs (i.e. money), along with expedited citizenship for all illegals, not just those born here.

Blacks, some of whom said they felt snubbed by Paige's conclave, manage to glean a few scraps. Like Hispanics, they get to wear special race-based medallions at graduation. This month, a UNLV research group recruited black and Latino students to a "focus group" on continuing education -- paying them $25 a head.

Such balkanizing bribery carries economic and social consequences. The cry for more school funding is inflamed by the higher per-capita costs of servicing poorly prepared immigrants. New census data report that almost one in five Clark County residents is now foreign-born, with a vast majority from the Third World countries of Central America. One in four households doesn't even speak English.

As this crowd places added stress on the K-12 system, Nevada's colleges face a different conundrum. Chancellor Jane Nichols notes that postsecondary enrollment is growing at only half the rate of the state's population.

"It seems like we don't have the established culture here," Nichols says in something of an understatement. Our "culture" -- or what passes for it -- is being transformed by a semi-literate underclass that demonstrates little interest in or aptitude for higher learning.

Nichols' solution? A redistribution scheme that jacks up fees by 40 percent and earmarks millions of dollars for (minority) student aid. Next will be calls to lower standards (see Henderson college) and in-state tuition for illegal aliens.

Meantime, the school district gets browner by the day. While Caucasian birthrates are flat and falling, school-age Latinas are reproducing in abundance. During the 1990s, births among Hispanics ages 15 to 17 climbed 125 percent and births to Hispanics ages 18 to 19 jumped a whopping 319 percent.

And as we sit in traffic, we'll just keep telling ourselves that diversity is our strength.

Ken Ward (kenricward@juno.com) is author of "Saints in Babylon: Mormons and Las Vegas." His education column appears Wednesday.

E-mail this story to a friend:

Click here for a printable version of this story

Comment on this story.

BEST OF LAS VEGAS