Dwight Jones is entering his ninth month as superintendent and faces a $150 million budget deficit. Of the school district’s more than 20,000 seniors, half are not on track to graduate this year. More rigorous curriculum and tougher standardized tests are likely going to lower proficiency scores and the graduation rate in coming years. These problems weigh heavy on Jones’ mind and keep him working late hours.
The Bermuda grass quad at the center of Griffith Elementary School has been replaced with desert landscaping and elevated garden beds for student interaction. The $20,000 project was sponsored by the Water Conservation Coalition.
Children in raggedy clothes pocketed ketchup packets at lunch, trying to slip them into their jeans unnoticed.
Four men in a van roll into a rough neighborhood along 28th Street, looking for a teenager. The file lists a name, Juaquin Ramirez, his age, 16, his history and an address. Juaquin doesn’t know they’re coming. If he did, he’d be gone.
Music teacher Scott Taflin regularly peruses the aisles of gently used school supplies available at the Public Education Foundation’s Teacher Exchange center.
At the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute there are no teachers and students but rather coordinators and members — more than 940 of them last year. OLLI offers 54 different courses, or “study groups,” as the members prefer them to be called.
The Clark County School District could feed $162 million more into classrooms over the next five years if it pulls money from departments not operating as “efficiently” as possible, namely custodial services and transportation.
Troy Gillett, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, alumnus, has created two winding columns of about 5,000 T-shirts for display at Lied Library as part of UNLV’s events commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The T-shirts were given to UNLV by New York-New York, which collected them from a shrine that was created outside the hotel following the terrorist attacks.
