Midnight classes at College of Southern Nevada come with kinks

It's almost midnight. The strip mall across the street, dead. The streets, slick with rain. The traffic lights, green. The guy working the counter at the gas station, grumpy.

Whoever said Las Vegas is a 24-hour town isn't hanging around the College of Southern Nevada's West Charleston campus, which is darker than the inside of a strip club.

That happens to be a problem right now because the hallway in Building H is filling up with students who are part of a pretty bold experiment here at the community college: midnight dollops of academia.

"We're working on the lights," promises a chuckling Darren Divine, the interim vice president of academic affairs at the college.

This is Divine's experiment, these midnight classes. They began last week, and there were a few glitches on that first night, Tuesday. The lights in the hallway, for one. They were on timers, which of course turned them off well before midnight. Those in the classrooms worked. The doors wouldn't stay unlocked.

A few kids showed up looking like they'd just rolled out of bed, probably because they thought they'd signed up for a noon class and didn't realize their mistake until it was too late.

Some showed up on the wrong day, too. What day is midnight? Is it Tuesday night? Is it Wednesday morning? Depends on who you ask.

Still, Divine characterized the experiment as a success, for now.

"We'll do it again for sure," he said toward the end of the first week of classes.

The seven classes offered were the basics: psychology, biology, English, math. They were 75 percent full as of Thursday. That means 170 students were brave enough -- or desperate enough, in some cases -- to try this.

"I've got to get up at 7 o'clock in the morning so I can go to my 8 o'clock class," says Joey Datillo, 19, who's the first student here at 11:30 p.m. Tuesday.

He's taking English 101, one of the most popular, and hard to get, classes at the college. He signed up for the late-late class not because he's a night owl, but because he had to. Everything else was full.

"It was my only choice," he said. "I'm usually in bed by 10." But he's young. He'll deal with it.

The community college's growth has been phenomenal in the past decade, topping 43,000 students last semester. And it's intensifying -- partly because the economy has sent droves of students back to school, and partly because budget cuts are limiting the number of available classes. CSN turned away 5,000 students last semester because everything they wanted was full.

So, the midnight experiment, which has been tried with success at some colleges back east and, to Divine, made perfect sense in a 24-hour town such as Las Vegas.

"I've been here since 8 o'clock this morning trying to beg my way in," said student Olivia Murphy. That's 16 hours.

Murphy, 28, who's studying to be a nurse, said she lost her job in November. She's taking prerequisite courses, but they keep filling up before she can get in.

She waited in line for three hours Tuesday morning, and was lucky enough to get into a biology class at a respectable time of day. But no such luck with English. Which is why she's here now, stalking the midnight class.

Down the hall, there's a guy who looks like he's napping on a bench. Arms folded, coat wrapped up tight, lying down, eyes closed.

"I didn't even know it was at midnight," says Ulises Martinez, 18, when he's disturbed by a reporter. He's one of the students who thought he was signing up for a noon class. But he's glad he got into an English class at all.

Divine says the time mix-up is the result of a quirk in the scheduling software. It won't allow you to put "midnight" as the time a class starts, so it's listed as 12 a.m.

More confounding was the mix-up about what day the class was. The software wouldn't allow the officials to start a class on a Tuesday night and end it on Wednesday morning.

School officials tried to call all the students to make sure they knew what day their classes were, but they didn't get through to everyone.

This is what happened to Allison Coots, 19, and Kristen Graham, 20. The two signed up for biology. Because Graham gets off work late in the afternoon, she figured a midnight class would be perfect. Coots joined her because they pretty much do everything together.

But they show up on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, when they should be here Monday and Wednesday nights. Divine breaks the news.

No problem, the girls say. It'll actually work out better because their biology lab is from 6 to 9 p.m. Mondays. They'll have time to grab a bite to eat between the lab and the late class.

Divine says school officials will figure out a solution to the noon confusion and the day mix-up for next semester.

They'd already fixed the lights and the door locks by the second day of classes, so that shouldn't be a lingering problem.

He said school officials will survey the students in these midnight classes extensively once the semester nears an end.

Did they like it? Did they find it as academically rewarding as a regular class? Why did they sign up? Would they do it again?

He said school officials want to do this at least another semester so the word spreads. Divine suspects there will be fewer mix-ups over the day and time issue once students realize that they're signing up for a class in the middle of the night.

Divine acknowledges that one potential surprise would be if the classes don't seem to be full of students who signed up for school at midnight because they work strange hours, which everyone thinks is common in Las Vegas, ostensibly a 24-hour town.

It might turn out that adding another class at a time when the strip malls are open, the gas stations are busy and the lights are supposed to be on would be just as effective.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.