With the primary election quickly approaching on June 14, and early voting already started, candidates have been working to convince voters why they are best to represent them in an elected office.
KNPR News has been talking to candidates over the last few weeks.
Today, we welcome Chris Garvey.
She’s running for re-election to the Clark County School District Board of Trustees for District B.
District B is a big chunk of the northern part of the valley. It goes north of Lone Mountain, east of U.S. 95, with a little tail going down Nellis Boulevard.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:
On sex education?
We want to put together a program that gives children the information they need to keep themselves healthy and understand reproduction. But we also want to take in those values of the families and be able to respect that to so parents can be engaged where they can have those conversations at home with their children that reflect their family’s values.
Right now, we’re looking at what do we need to do within our curriculum and are there options? Can we allow parents to say, ‘Okay, I want this level of education for my children that takes in the basics?’ And then there might be another level that families could opt into that have a little more information that some families aren’t comfortable with.
Is an abstinence-only curriculum going to change?
That is a foolproof way of not transmitting diseases, of not having pregnancies that are unwanted happen. But I think we have to be aware that there are other options out there and we can give that information.
On autonomous schools:
If you look at some of the conversations that have been happening on the board over the last two years or so, that’s actually where we have been going. When we start looking at doing strategic budgeting and pushing that autonomy of how you spend your dollars as a building principal, that’s come from the board and superintendent.
When you look at having actually dollars follow children, that’s been a discussion to and I think that’s one we really need to look at because right now we don’t actually have actual dollars going to the school building. We use an averaging of teachers’ salaries and it works out because we’re a big system.
Yes, I think I support reorganization of the school district and how we do that sort of thing. I think it is very important that we’re having these conversations about [AB] 394 because it is actually opening that dialogue with legislators and people in the community. And I think there is a lot of things being learned by those members that they weren’t aware of. That weren’t in their mind set as far as what was happening in the district.
On low graduation rate:
When I first was elected the graduation rate was 62 percent. We’re now up to 72 percent and growing. And that’s the important word there: growing, because we’ve got a long way to go. We have to think about some of the things that happened during that time too. The worst economic recession in our history happened. Las Vegas was hit very, very hard.
To have that much growth during that time is really great. I’m really proud that I was part of an effort called Reclaim Your Future where we as a district started to look at individual children and went, “hey so-and-so should’ve been showing back up at our door and they didn’t.’ So we went out and engaged the community to join us and start knocking on those doors where we last knew where the kids were at and telling them we want you back.
What we need to do going forward, we need to look at each individual child and figure out what it is we need to help them succeed to get where they’re going.
On English Language Learners:
We have to address this. It’s one of those things that if we don’t it’s not going to be good for our society. It’s not going to be good for those children.
We’ve had some really good starts with that with the Zoom Schools. We just focused on those areas where we had that high language population and working with community partners. We’ve made some really good best practices that have been implemented. But now, we’re bringing that into a more laser focus that we can start going across the district. It is a really big lift.
What’s the biggest issue facing the School Board right now?
I think it’s looking at our resources. Poverty is one of the biggest problems for the Clark County School District and how it effects our children. Now, when we’re looking at how our resources are being effected, that’s going to be a big challenge for us.
We just received information that the budget we thought we were going to receive has been impacted by the property tax cap and a short fall in what they thought the sales tax was going to be. We’re looking at another hole, $36 million probably. We have to figure out how we’re going to do it. At some point, you can’t do things cheaper. You have say, ‘this is as cheap as we can go and still get the results we need.’ Our kids are worth it.
Chris Garvey, School Board Trustee, District B, Clark County School District (CCSD)
