Rotarians award grants to Palo Verde High School

Palo Verde High School recently benefited from the largesse of the Rotary Club of Las Vegas Summerlin. The philanthropic group awarded grants totaling almost $5,000 through the Las Vegas Northwest Rotary Foundation to support three programs at Palo Verde, 333 S. Pavilion Center Drive.

Gregg Townsend, president of the Rotary Club, said the school is often the club’s focus, as it helps support the school’s Interact Club, which he described as the young adult version of Rotary.

“It’s all about helping the kids,” Townsend said of the effort. “Our motto is ‘Service Above Self,’ and we had a benefactor a few years ago who gave $10,000 out of his own pocket to grow our foundation. He has since moved, but we wanted to continue it in some fashion.”

Vicki Steffenhagen, who heads the video production classes at Palo Verde, was awarded $1,200 to expand the control room capabilities for the school’s in-house news station. Students in the video production classes produce a daily live newscast and videos for special school functions. The grant will allow them to purchase an expanded graphics program that provides state-of-the art tools for graphics, text, virtual sets, Internet feeds and remote broadcasts.

The second grant, worth $600, was awarded to Carol Campbell. Her application outlined a need for graphing calculators and mathematics class supplies. They were needed to help students pass math proficiency tests required by the state for graduation.

Grant No. 3 was for $3,194 and was awarded to teachers Duane Hansen and Melissa Ferrer. The funds will be used to acquire physics classroom technology to enhance science, technology, engineering and math education at Palo Verde, impacting more than 1,000 students in the next five years. The funds will purchase live data loggers, five motion sensing probes and five force sensing probes and a site license for graphical analysis software.

Robert Bridel, who heads the grant effort for the Rotary Club, said it raised the funds by holding two events –– a Jimmy Buffett-inspired Cheese Burger in Summerlin dinner event with silent and live auctions and an annual wine raffle.

“We gave fewer grants this year, but we gave bigger grants,” Bridel said. “Historically, our grants range in the $250-$350 range. ... In the past, we’ve given out as many as 12 or 15. They have to be very specific about how they’re going to use the money. We don’t just give them money and not know what they’re going to do with it.”

Rotarians recalled how it helped Cimarron-Memorial High School, 2301 N. Tenaya Way, with tens of thousands of dollars over the years for its robotics program, allowing it to achieve a level where it was winning competitions and gaining business sponsors. The Rotarians also sponsor programs at Johnson Junior High School, 7701 Ducharme Ave., and McMillan Elementary School, 7000 Walt Lott Drive.

Dan Phillips, Palo Verde principal, said the grants were appreciated in an era where a new math book costs $150 and a biology book $175.

“The demographics of our school (have) changed a great deal,” Phillips said. “We’re about 52 percent white at Palo. We are not a Summerlin school. We are a school in Summerlin, and I’ve always believed that.”

Phillips said he’s losing some of his best students to the career and technical academies. He said the lack of funding and the high classroom size have had parents pulling out their children to attend private schools.

“We’re like Custer at Little Big Horn,” Phillips said. “They’re scalping us.”

That said, he challenged people to find a better public school with teachers who give their all despite being hampered by budget cuts.

“If people who are critical of public education would just come to the site and see what we’re doing, it would really debunk a lot of myths that people have,” Phillips said. “... We’re doing a great job with these kids. They’re going to every Ivy League school. They’re going to Stanford. They’re going to Williams. They’re going to Amherst. They’re going into military academies. We’re producing a very, very highly qualified-caliber student. Now, whether there’s a place (in Nevada) for those kids to come back after they earn their degrees, that’s another question.”

Palo Verde is in the process of applying to become an International Baccalaureate school. According to its website, IB offers four programs for students to help develop the intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills to succeed in a rapidly globalizing world. 

The Diploma Programme, for students 16 to 19, is a demanding two-year curriculum leading to final examinations and a qualification that is welcomed by leading universities around the world.

There are more than 1,097,000 IB students at 3,575 schools in 145 countries.

Contact Summerlin/Summerlin South View reporter Jan Hogan at jhogan@viewnews.com or 702-387-2949.