CCSD trustees stay upbeat despite stressful path to reorganization

Just more than 180 days remain between now and the deadline for a transformed Clark County School District that will ideally be the gleaming product of a lengthy reorganization.

Yet with a number of key resources missing, the question remains whether officials can successfully complete the overhaul — one that will give power to individual schools, run largely by organizational teams of parents and staff — as the clock ticks toward mid-August.

The major obstacle began when the deadline for the implementation was pushed from 2018-2019 to the upcoming school year.

Now, roughly six months before takeoff, the board is seeking an injunction in court to halt certain aspects of the overhaul. The pending lawsuit has yet to be heard in Carson City District Court.

Trustees have remained mostly silent about the lawsuit, but officials have maintained a consistent outlook: they will do the work as best they can.

“We’ll make do,” said Trustee Linda Young. “But it puts a lot of stress on the staff, on our teachers.”

She said the district needed the extra year to successfully implement the reorganization.

“We want to do this,” she said. “But we want to do it right.”

Following Friday’s annual State of the District speech, Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky spoke of the reorganization efforts and said every school has an organizational team in place that will be completing its budget by Feb. 22.

“We then move forward to implementation working to ensure that by the time school opens on Aug. 14, all those programs and initiatives and people are in place to ensure the success of our students,” he said.

But there are resources officials say are critical to the reorganization effort — including a human capital management system that could cost up to $46 million and a weighted funding formula that budgets for categories of students at each school.

“Anything that you roll out is a process,” said Trustee Lola Brooks. “There’s always going to be bumps in the road.”

A successful project, she said, will address those bumps.

Trustee Erin Cranor said the district is already engaged in parts of the reorganization — such as budgeting based on the needs of each school.

“The majority of schools, I think, are becoming really fluent in that and learning how to make and adjust plans that really fit what their kids and their school need then,” she said.

But the other parts of the effort that are up in the air, she said, will remain up in the air until they’re not anymore.

“Whatever’s still going to be uncertain will still be uncertain,” Cranor said. “We’ve navigated it the best we can.”

Contact Amelia Pak-Harvey at 702-383-4630 or apak-harvey@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AmeliaPakHarvey on Twitter.