Backing schools

While many kids in the Truckee Meadows were getting their last summer flings in before the start of school, the fifth-graders at Spanish Springs Elementary, a year-round school, were taking tests last Friday. Math tests. Vocabulary tests. And spelling tests.

Teacher Barbara Surritte gracefully wandered between the desks of her students, pronouncing spelling words slowly and crisply, then making up sentences to put the words in context.

“Area, a-re-a,” she said. “The area that is dirtiest is inside your desk.”

Her students chuckled at this.

Surritte, a tall woman in her 30s clad in jeans and a white blouse, taught for seven years in Las Vegas, then for six years in Spanish Springs. She said she loves the year-round schedule because it keeps the kids learning. She loves the area, loves the school and enjoys the lovely early morning drive to work along the Pyramid Highway. And she loves her kids.

“My philosophy is that I have five hours and 15 minutes to give your children the best academic day they can have,” she said. “I’m more entertaining than the TV and faster than the remote control.”

Surritte revels in stretching her fifth-graders and watching them reach ever-higher plateaus of learning. As a teacher who’s pledged to be proactive as far as what happens in her students’ futures, she doesn’t mind sending them off to sixth grade. It’s what happens next—middle school—that bugs Surritte so much that she’s signed on as co-vice chairwoman of the Support Our Schools Campaign Committee, a group formed to help get out the vote on Washoe County School District Question 1 in November.

Question 1 would allow the school district to sell bonds—without raising property taxes—on its own to fund six new schools and to fix up or enlarge several older schools.

A look at her own class illustrates the need, Surritte said.

After spending their first seven years of education at Spanish Springs, Surritte’s students—like thousands of other elementary students in the Washoe County School District—will head off to spend seventh and eighth grades in less desirable circumstances. The kids in Surritte’s class, for example, will be headed to Sparks Middle School, a facility overbooked by at least a couple hundred students.

“We bring these kids to a high level of achievement [in elementary school], then throw them into overcrowded classrooms,” she said. “We send them on to a middle school where teachers are so overburdened that I don’t know if they have the time to get to know them like I know them.”

Still, she speaks in glowing terms of the leadership of Sparks Middle School, saying that teachers and administrators there are doing their best while working around such unpleasant obstacles as mobile classrooms. Surritte has taught in mobile classrooms. She doesn’t like them.

“When students are walking to portables outside of the building, that’s educational time taken away,” she said. “Every minute is so valuable.”

It’s hard to keep kids on task during travel to and from mobile classrooms. The classrooms are often too small for project-based learning, which helps kids put their book knowledge into practice. All this subtracts from student achievement.

She motioned to her students, who were by this time hard at work on a math test while a CD with soft music—a flute and harp duet—played.

“That’s what these fifth-graders are facing,” she says. “The impact that has on student learning is horrific.”

Rollover bonds

In November, voters from Incline Village to Gerlach will decide whether to let schools sell bonds—without a property tax hike—to be used to get $309 million for such projects as the building of three new middle schools and three new elementary schools, as well as increasing the capacity at three existing high schools during the next 10 years. The money could also be used to upgrade, repair and renovate existing facilities, some as old as 65 years, and for technology upgrades that would give kids the kinds of computers that run software designed in the past decade.

Yes, all this can be ours—for our kids—for the low, low cost of, well, nothing more than we’re already paying. Nowadays, the property tax rate collected for schools stands is 38.85 cents per $100 of assessed value. For a home valued at $200,000, that would be $780.

If we keep this rate, we can have new schools. It’s almost magic.

“If we can do a decent job of explaining to people why it’s needed and how it works, the thing makes so darn much sense, it’s going to sell itself,” said Steve Mulvenon, spokesman for the Washoe County School District.

Why are new schools needed?

Student enrollment in Washoe County has grown from about 40,000 to 58,000 students in the past 10 years. And that growth rate is showing no signs of slowing, let alone stopping. An additional 22,600 students are projected over the next 10 years. In communities like Spanish Springs, new housing developments are popping up like pox in a classroom full of un-inoculated kindergarteners.

The building of new school is not something funded by the state through the general fund. That general fund money, which pays for teachers, buses and history textbooks, you’ll recall, is scarce. Just months ago, the Washoe County School Board voted to trim a hefty $8.5 million from the budget. That meant a 10 percent cut across the board, more high-school kids per teacher, fewer new textbooks and the elimination of the fifth-grade strings program.

The money to build new schools or make any other kind of capital improvement for education comes from property taxes in the county. To date, the process has gone something like this: The school district looks at increasing enrollment and at its long-range facility plan and says, “Yup, we’d better build new schools down in the South Meadows and up in Spanish Springs or things are going to get ugly fast.” To find money to build, the district has to sell bonds, which are paid back through increased property taxes.

The catch? Voters in the county have to approve the bond sale during an election year. That’s fair. No one really likes tax increases. But the whole process can be pretty time-consuming. And sometimes, not always, voters get stingy. A 1996 bond sale to fund new school construction was rejected by voters.

“That put us behind the curve,” Mulvenon said.

How would Question 1, sometimes referred to as the “rollover bond question,” help? Well, by giving the district the ability to sell new bonds as old bonds are retired—"rolling” bonds over—within the next 10 years. After that decade is up, the current process would return. If approved by voters, the question would give the school district the ability to begin selling bonds as soon as January. It could be breaking ground on, say, a new middle school in Spanish Springs by spring. That wouldn’t help Surritte’s current fifth-graders. But it’d still be much faster than waiting to offer up a bond for the public to vote on in the next election—in 2004.

“It takes a good 18 months to get one of those things up and open,” Mulvenon said. “But clearly, we’d be two years ahead.”

Learning by rove

Some folks want to know why the school district doesn’t make better use of the facilities it already has. Mobile classrooms may not be the greatest, but they work. And if schools just adopt year-round schedules with roving classrooms to make the best use of space, wouldn’t that solve the problem of increasing enrollment?

Hmm. While year-round schedules work wonders, some say, with academic content, you probably wouldn’t be thrilled if your child ended up in one of the roving, homeless classes that move month-to-month around the building as students shift from on-tracks to off-tracks.

For Lisa Townsend’s first-grade class at Spanish Springs Elementary, Friday was moving day. When I walked into the classroom, a bevy of 6-year-olds were cleaning out and washing desks with dripping paper towels.

“Welcome to the fun of roving chaos,” Townsend said in a spare moment while trying to help kids carefully pack their books, pencils and paper into bins that fit into a square cabinet on wheels.

These first-graders use a different classroom every month, depending on what classes are “off-track.”

“It’s really confusing,” Townsend said. “The first-graders don’t understand. Every month, they have to re-figure out where they belong. They line up outside in a different place. The fire drills are different.”

It’s hard for roving teachers, too.

“When you come into a classroom, another teacher has stuff everywhere,” Townsend said. “You have to figure out where to put your stuff to make [the classroom] functional.”

Townsend has a rolling bulletin board with fabric and Velcro attachments. It looks a bit like a department store clothing rack.

“All of my stuff is rolling,” she said. “It has to be moveable.”

Plus, like travel time to a mobile classroom, the setting up and taking down of gear sucks up time that students could be learning to read, write and subtract, Townsend said. Then, she turned her attention back to the class.

“You need to start drying off your desks,” she spoke over the din of young people moving around. “I will call you by bin number.”

Questions on the question

It’s not like there’s organized opposition to Question 1, but a few concerns have been raised on and off by property owners.

For one thing, all this development is lining somebody’s pocket—and it’s probably not yours. Since developers are making out like bandits by selling new homes to transplants from California, where homes cost three times as much, can’t we just pass some of that cost along to them in, say, impact fees?

Don’t think the school district hasn’t thought of this.

“We’ve been down in front of the Legislature for the past three sessions lobbying on behalf of raising impact fees [for developers],” Mulvenon said. “And we’ll do it again. But our school board doesn’t have the legal authority to impose an impact fee.”

Also, Mulvenon said, even higher impact fees wouldn’t net enough money to build the needed schools.

“We’d never have impact fees large enough to not have a bond issue,” he said.

Another anti-bond argument is that, as it currently stands, when bonds are paid off, property taxes will eventually go down until the next bond is approved.

Also, Mulvenon said that some folks in the community have expressed concern that the school district would go hog wild with the freedom to issue bonds.

“People say, ‘I’m not real sure I want to give the school district a blank check to spend willy-nilly on whatever they want,’ “ he said. But the question doesn’t give anyone a “blank check.” The district can’t raise property taxes. And the money must be used on capital improvements, such as buildings and technology infrastructure like new computer labs. It can’t be used to bump up teacher salaries or reinstate the fifth-grade strings program.

Even bonds for capital improvements have to go through a two-step approval process, Mulvenon said. If the district wants to issue bonds in January to fund one or two new middle schools, it would have to take the concept before a facility oversight panel made up of 11 members, none of them school district employees. Then the project would have to get past the county’s debt management commission to ensure that paying back the bond would not increase property taxes.

“They are the protectors of the 38.85 cents,” Mulvenon said.

It’s the little things

Surritte paused over the desk of

Cody Daniels, 10, then moved on to help other students.

Daniels was dressed in a black T-shirt with a green extraterrestrial playing basketball. The slogan read, “I believe I can fly.” When asked to name his favorite teacher at Spanish Springs Elementary, he paused reflectively before naming Ms. Surritte.

“She’s really funny,” he said. “She likes to talk to Ed our skeleton.”

Ed is a hinged cardboard cutout who lurks over a board on which the weekend’s homework is listed: “Work on your report. Swim in a pool. Take a hike. Read a book to someone you (heart).”

When Surritte surveys her class of hard-working fifth-graders, she sees beauty in their diversity and their potential. When she looks at the quality of Washoe County teachers and principals, she’s similarly struck. She told me a story, passed along to her, about the principal of crowded Sparks Middle School becoming teary-eyed with pride for his staff.

She noted the many teachers who work for higher certifications or for masters’ degrees. Surritte herself has both a master’s of education degree from the University of Nevada, Reno, and her National Board Certified Teacher diploma on her classroom wall.

“We’re doing what we need to do,” she said. “We need tools from the community to support kids. … We need space.”

Not far from where Ed the Skeleton watches over fifth-graders, Surritte has hung one of several slogans: “It’s the little things you do that make the big things happen.”

As she walked me to the door, Surritte told me that the worst response to Question 1 likely won’t be any organized anti-school group.

“The opposition is apathy,” she said. “And if it doesn’t pass, the consequences to our children will be … let me think of a good word …”

She couldn’t.