CCSD, FROM PAGE 1:

Poverty, transcience won’t be solved by ccsd breakup

found small school districts tended to educate students better than large ones. On its face, that sounds like a winning scenario for CCSD, the fifth largest school district in the country. But when it comes to the impact of breaking up large districts to create smaller ones, the research simply is not conclusive.

“There’s not a lot of (research) looking at deconsolidation,” said David Damore, a UNLV political science professor and co-author of the Lincy report. “There’s a lot of uncertainty associated with it.”

The Lincy report merely found that districts with fewer students tended to perform better on average on standardized tests than larger districts, not necessarily that deconsolidation resulted in better achieving districts.

The Guinn Center for Policy Priorities studied each of Gov. Brian Sandoval’s education priorities this session and also came out neutral on the plan to break up CCSD.

“You can find one study which says theres a link … (then) you can do one more Google search which finds the exact opposite,” said Nancy Brune, executive director of the Guinn Center.

The most comparable district to CCSD to enact a similar change is the Jordan School District in Salt Lake City, which was the largest in that state until it was cut in half in 2009. Still, with around 78,000 students, that district already was considerably smaller than CCSD, which currently has nearly 320,000 students.

Critics of the plan to break up CCSD point to problems that arose after Jordan’s breakup, including massive budget decreases due to a loss of taxable property.

Both the Lincy report and a study by the Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce found the most important factors in student achievement — poverty and transience — had nothing to do with district size. that the ideal district hovers between 3,000 and 30,000 students. Anything above that tends to result in higher perstudent costs.