Vegas schools overloaded w/kids

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/us/las-vegas-schools-groan-from-growing-pains.html?_r=0

LAS VEGAS — Schools in this suddenly robust community are so packed these days that 13 of them stay open 12 months a year. Children go to classes and eat lunch in cramped, windowless trailers, bustling with restless students. Thousands more take online classes at home, and school district administrators, desperate for space, are looking to abandoned strip malls for classrooms.

Clark County School District reported that enrollment had reached 318,597 in its 357 schools, a record;
it was 308,377 in 2012, when the economy was near its worst.


geez.. Vegas has more online kids than San Fran has in the entire school system? (San Fran has ~4500 kids enrolled.)

and a 3% increase in kids over 2 yrs makes or breaks a school system in a major city!?

Too bad, given that the schools are reputed to be so terrible in Las Vegas.

Lousy schools, lousy health care: great place to visit, but ...

Quote: MrV

Too bad, given that the schools are reputed to be so terrible in Las Vegas.

Lousy schools, lousy health care: great place to visit, but ...

Tru dat.

Quote: 100xOdds

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/us/las-vegas-schools-groan-from-growing-pains.html?_r=0

LAS VEGAS — Schools in this suddenly robust community are so packed these days that 13 of them stay open 12 months a year. Children go to classes and eat lunch in cramped, windowless trailers, bustling with restless students. Thousands more take online classes at home, and school district administrators, desperate for space, are looking to abandoned strip malls for classrooms.

Clark County School District reported that enrollment had reached 318,597 in its 357 schools, a record;
it was 308,377 in 2012, when the economy was near its worst.


geez.. Vegas has more online kids than San Fran has in the entire school system? (San Fran has ~4500 kids enrolled.)

and a 3% increase in kids over 2 yrs makes or breaks a school system in a major city!?

Well keep in mind the public schools are run by the county govt. With healthy does of meddling/input from the state and federal education system. It would be a miracle if they worked right.

Quote: 100xOdds

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/us/las-vegas-schools-groan-from-growing-pains.html?_r=0

LAS VEGAS — Schools in this suddenly robust community are so packed these days that 13 of them stay open 12 months a year. Children go to classes and eat lunch in cramped, windowless trailers, bustling with restless students. Thousands more take online classes at home, and school district administrators, desperate for space, are looking to abandoned strip malls for classrooms.

GOOD! Schools need to move beyond the 19th Century model they are stuck in. Not sure why they would be in "windowless trailers" when you can put up a steel building fast and cheap.

Was it here I read there are like 15 dialects
of Spanish spoken in Vegas by illegals in
the public schools? Could be that the illegals
are the big problem. I'm just glad I got
edumacated in the 60's when they still
made you take Latin and algebra and at
least one language.

Our kid was going to a great elementary school in Summerlin that got new admin and fell off a cliff. We decided to do online school and it has been great. There is a huge home/online schooling community in Las Vegas.

Quote: AZDuffman

Quote: 100xOdds

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/us/las-vegas-schools-groan-from-growing-pains.html?_r=0

LAS VEGAS — Schools in this suddenly robust community are so packed these days that 13 of them stay open 12 months a year. Children go to classes and eat lunch in cramped, windowless trailers, bustling with restless students. Thousands more take online classes at home, and school district administrators, desperate for space, are looking to abandoned strip malls for classrooms.

GOOD! Schools need to move beyond the 19th Century model they are stuck in. Not sure why they would be in "windowless trailers" when you can put up a steel building fast and cheap.

Boom and bust, perhaps? Mixed with migratory worker patterns for seasonal changes in attendance specific to Vegas, maybe? Those trailers (which we've used extensively in Florida) are prefab classrooms with all the wiring/equipment for teaching in the walls (bookshelves, A/V/computer sockets/movie screens, whiteboards, etc). And they can be moved around semester to semester, even week to week, to bring the classrooms to the schools with overcrowding issues, and keep from bussing students 20-30 miles or denying them schooling.

Socrates used a log, with a student on one end, teacher on the other. I think the mobility/flexibility of handling overflow this way is a small bit of genius.

The teachers union in Vegas is trying to get more political clout and is pushing for a state lottery with priority to "education" (a euphemism for teacher's salaries).

The popularity of online learning is perhaps due to the fact that shift work is so common ... Vegas has the expression "its my Friday" meaning "I'm off the next two days" but schools are government run and undoubtedly have a M-F schedule even though parents are often on a Wednesday thru Sunday schedule in the casinos, bars, restaurants. Even day care is often night 'day care' in Vegas.

The quality of the schools is low. Of course it is. Its low everywhere. Its a last chance city and alot of people who move there have no money to move elsewhere.

Vegas needs blackjack dealers, luggage luggers, limo drivers, uniform washers, line cooks, bartenders, fast food workers, oil change scramblers, etc. .... Vegas has no need for an overly educated work force. How much education does a pimp or a hooker need? In Vegas, most high school dropouts wind up in the sex trade. Follow their names and booking numbers and cross check with real estate records; you will find those "club promoters" own expensive cars and expensive mansions and even the hookers have more money in a savings account that comparables who stayed in school and work in fast food vending.

The schools in Vegas are bad? Good. As long as do gooders only want to throw tax money at a problem, it will only go the teachers and quite frankly the teachers don't deserve the money they get now. Instead of paying more money in taxes and having it go to a teacher, spend more money on a street walker and have it go to the teacher's former student.

Of course various flaky junk metrics are continuously trotted out to characterize every public school district as suffering oh so terribly and the prescribed solution is to further raise the rate of increase in the spectacular quantity of money shoveled at the public education industry. And among the truly worst continue to be the most lavishly funded. District of Columbia or Chicago, anyone? But. Most of the economy and the daily lives of most of the people in the area have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any aspect of the tourist industry, not even very indirectly. The Las Vegas metro area contains two-million people. For decades the population has been growing at a rate more than five times that of the tourist trade. If tourism and all secondary and tertiary spinoffs from it vanished the area would contain 1.8-ish after it settled out, and more than a million of them wouldn't notice all that much or really give two shits, and many of them would be right not to. The area does have a great shortage of people with skills of many kinds at many levels, much more so than what it actually tends to attract from the image carried in the fantasies of people who imagine they "know" what it is from their drunken sorties to some slice of the Strip resort corridor, often while never having actually set foot in or very near Las Vegas.

Why would anyone live in a hot, windy, dusty part of the Mojave Desert?
What would anyone actually do in Vegas if all the tourists and tourist related businesses disappeared?

Quote: FleaStiff

hat would anyone actually do in Vegas if all the tourists and tourist related businesses disappeared?

Work.

Get drunk, get high.

Watch TV.

Try to get laid.

Same as everywhere else.

Here are the enrollment figures for Clark County since 1999-2000:

Year Ending	Students
2000	217,526
2001	231,655
2002	245,659
2003	256,574
2004	270,529
2005	283,233
2006	293,961
2007	306,167
2008	312,546
2009	315,350
2010	313,558
2011	314,023
2012	321,655
2013	327,770

Source

I would call a 50% increase in students over 13 years a definite problem - especially if the bureaucrats in Carson City are breathing down Clark County's necks to keep the student/teacher ratio down, which requires more classrooms just as much as it requires more teachers. (I remember when my "classroom" was an auditorium where three classes were taught simultaneously, separated only by partitions...and my "desk" was my lap when I sat on the floor.)

(And as for San Francisco, the San Francisco Unified School District reports 57,000 students, not 4500, according to the California Department of Education's figures for 2013. Or was 4500 the number of "online" students?)

Quote: MrV

Work.

Get drunk, get high.

Watch TV.

Try to get laid.

Same as everywhere else.

Yes. That is exactly what they'd do, since it is exactly the same as most of them do right now and have been doing for a long time, not remotely connected to or anywhere near the Strip and the tourist business in the small narrow corridor out near the airport that in the fantasies of some people's imagination they "know" is "Las Vegas."

News flash: tourists are not the first thing on peoples' minds when they clock out of their machinist jobs fabricating precision specialty parts or making industrial metals or chemicals in a Henderson industrial park, or one of the software firms or national distribution centers in one of the North Las Vegas industrial parks, or for the online retailing business at Zappos headquarters in downtown LV, or at one of the world's largest Air Force bases at Nellis AFB and all its related ancillary private contractors, or for a financial services business such as Barclays Bank's center for their US credit card operations or half a dozen others similar to it... My oh my, what could people possibly be doing in Phoenix, or Salt Lake City, or Albuquerque, or Denver? And everybody in Los Angeles must be an actor or else catering lunch for them, right?

There must be nobody in any of those places and surely they will blow away altogether and become ghost towns any day now, if you don't grace them with your weekend visit that they all must live and die for. They don't have steel mills! No place can possibly exist for long without steel mills, and widget assembly! That, and buggy whip & wagon wheel making. 'Cause everybody else is just changing their oil. Errr, except they actually do have that. In fact the entire food chain of industrial metals is a significant industry in the area as it has been for longer than servicing the more slow-witted gullible part of the tourist trade. But alas, even though there is a lot of the modern equivalent of blacksmithing happening there is no buggy whip or wagon wheel making, so surely it would be doomed without part-time jobs by immigrants changing the bedsheets and mopping the puke of the honored highly esteemed oh so very important visiting douch... ah, oops, make that guests.

Because they are the center of the universe, and all else simply must orbit around them. Even thirty miles and an hour's drive away. If they don't see it when stumbling from their slot machine to their hotel room, it cannot exist. Because it doesn't have them, and they didn't see it on the TV commercial, so it isn't there, or if it was, it couldn't be doing anything much at all without them and wouldn't even have a reason to want to.

Quote:

News flash: tourists are not the first thing on peoples' minds when they clock out of their machinist jobs fabricating precision specialty parts or making industrial metals or chemicals in a Henderson industrial park,

Yes, we certainly need more chemical plants, e.g. rocket fuel plants in Henderson.

Quote: MrV

Yes, we certainly need more chemical plants, e.g. rocket fuel plants in Henderson.

Yes, the PEPCON event three decades ago was terrible: two people were killed. Or, nearly 15% as many as in the Vanport event that occurred as a direct result of willful pubic policy by the Housing Authority in Portland & Multnomah County, Oregon (where I lived for 25 years) which in one day completely demolished much of the black community of 15,000 or so existing at that time in the town where you live now. Though certainly neither of those would come close to equaling the regular though usually less photogenic carnage involving moronic drunken tourists on the Strip routinely every week.

Vanport was a bit before my time, but we had a cool albeit deadlier attraction for awhile that could recur at any time.

I woke up that morning after spending the night at the home of a brand new friend, and since we were preoccupied with what we were doing we didn't hear any news about the eruption before going out to a forested park near her place. It was peculiar wondering "WTF is this stuff?" as ash rained down through the trees, though I don't remember thinking that anything about the gritty mud falling out of the sky was cool, just weird and kind of spooky. But I did find a handy unexpected business opportunity for myself in cleaning up all that crap for others businesses for weeks afterward. Even though it was powdery it was also very abrasive and played hell with the essential equipment of many local businesses, as well as getting sucked into the engines of the personal vehicles of their employees, so tons of it all had to be thoroughly removed from their property before they could start to get back in operation. I guess it got cool to look at pictures of it and think about it some months later after it had all pretty much been cleaned up or naturally washed away into the river.

Hopefully kids will ignore casino math and keep making high house edge bets to subsidize my income.

Quote: Pokeraddict

Our kid was going to a great elementary school in Summerlin that got new admin and fell off a cliff. We decided to do online school and it has been great. There is a huge home/online schooling community in Las Vegas.

Maybe this is a different discussion, but with online schooling I worry that the kids will not interact with other kids. How is that going to effect them down the road? Prior to buying a house next week in a great school district we talked about moving to a more affordable school district but doing the home schooling thing. This was one of my concerns. I am afraid of the next generation of unsocial butterflies.

Quote: GWAE

This was one of my concerns. I am afraid of the next generation of unsocial butterflies.

You mean rugged individualists which are what Americans are supposed to be, not collectivists or people who've grown up constantly hearing the words "share" or "socialize" but instead people taught to respect privacy and private property.

Quote: FleaStiff

You mean rugged individualists which are what Americans are supposed to be, not collectivists or people who've grown up constantly hearing the words "share" or "socialize" but instead people taught to respect privacy and private property.

We also talked about how everyone wins. I am old enough to remember losing, and I think that is something that needs taught to everyone.

Quote: GWAE

Maybe this is a different discussion, but with online schooling I worry that the kids will not interact with other kids. How is that going to effect them down the road? Prior to buying a house next week in a great school district we talked about moving to a more affordable school district but doing the home schooling thing. This was one of my concerns. I am afraid of the next generation of unsocial butterflies.

I used to wonder about this and home-schooling, then I look at what our schools are producing. The "societal effects" of many of today's schools are little better than a moderate-security prison. If people behaved at work like too many of the kids in a school do they would be walked out by security if not arrested. Then there is the indoctrination, which goes without saying.

The best solution to me would be some kind of group home schooling. 5-10 parents get together and split the work. The kids get the benefit of the home-school but do not end up isolated.