A daily refuge for energetic pupils, the western portion of the playground at Wendell Williams Elementary in West Las Vegas looks, on this Friday afternoon, like a fire drill: Pupils marching in lockstep (eyes front, head high) out of beige portables arrayed like so many mobile homes. Teachers hover like cumulus clouds, urging pep in their steps.
Only the kids coming out of the portables—"learning cottages" in educational parlance—aren't Williams pupils. The text on the middle cottage reads "Kermit Booker," a reference to Booker Elementary.
Just last spring, Booker pupils frolicked on their own playground, walked their own hallways and learned in their own school, a careworn Martin Luther King Boulevard campus situated much like an educational Gaza Strip between rival gang neighborhoods and lacking the amenities of newer campuses popcorning up elsewhere in the Valley.
Last summer Booker was demolished to make way for a newer campus set on 13.8 acres on Martin Luther King Boulevard between Lake Mead and Carey. A campus with 62,200 square feet of classrooms divided into small "learning villages" and designed for Booker's unique problems. Shared common areas and outdoor space in the campus interior to keep pupils, teachers and administrators away from wandering winos and the occasional bullets. To keep pupils away from the streets, bus lanes and parking areas will be designed accordingly and the main entrance will be repositioned to face south toward Balzar Avenue—it faced east on MLK.
Plans called for a January 2007 opening. But no contractors showed up for a November pre-bidding conference. No contractor = no building.
Three months later, still no one, pushing the opening date to ... who knows?
Add this uncertainty to the furor caused by the school board in May when it declined to hear a proposal on releasing funds for the new campus—the Bond Oversight Committee, which reviews expenditures and sends proposals to the school board for approval, didn't have a quorum (seven of 13 members showed) at its monthly meeting—and to heartburn over design questions (is the 660-student capacity too small?) and rising construction costs (some projects have come in 40 percent over budget) and you can see why the Booker community feels slighted.
"The concerns of the parents, teachers and students is that there be an urgency to get the building built," Booker Principal Beverly Mathis says. "As we look around, we see other school district buildings that have come up so quickly. We know that the Clark County School District will move as quickly as it possibly can once the project gets up and rolling. We just ask for focused attention on Kermit R. Booker Elementary."
Paul Gerner, associate superintendent of facilities for the Clark County School District, says he understands the anxiety, even Mathis' feeling of neglect. His hands are tied. The Valley's breakneck building boom has siphoned contractors.
"We have about 20 firms on that [pre-approved contractor] list. Lots of them were interested and fully supportive of this program, but the timing was not the best for them," Gerner says. "One of the steady providers we use had come up against its bonding limit. Other companies were chockablock with other business and couldn't take on any more. The total construction capacity of the town is being stretched. You throw a project like [MGM Mirage's Project] CityCenter into it and you can tie up 30 percent to 40 percent of the construction workforce in one contract."
Used to be you could throw a rock and hit a construction worker. Katie McMurray, chapter vice president for the Las Vegas chapter of Associated Builders and Contractors, an industry trade group, says the high-rise condo boom has made finding qualified labor a needle-in-the-haystack experience. Most of ABC's member contractors don't handle school construction projects.
"All contractors, union and not, are having this problem," says McMurray, who declined to speculate about whether Booker's location scares contractors.
Some Booker backers question why the school district subjected plans to a Ready Check review, which involves examination by a nationally recognized third party. The district does Ready Check reviews on nearly all non-prototype school projects, Gerner says.
"We did it on the Northwest Career and Technical Center because we found problems with that design," he says. "We did on Thirriot Elementary [a new, two-story school prototype] and it still opened late by two weeks. We do it any time a schedule will allow."
Rather than hold a December pre-bidding conference after the November no-shows—"lots of luck getting anybody at Christmastime"—Gerner says it made sense to run the Ready Check review. Booker's architects will get the chance to respond to any concerns, which improves the chances of a smooth construction schedule. He posits: "If we tried to accelerate this thing, we would put ourselves at risk of the school opening later than sooner. When you do that, you get things like the Regional Justice Center. There is a community perception that we're picking on Booker, but that's not the case."
Meantime, back on Williams Elementary, Principal Brenda McKinney says the two-schools-on-one-campus construct is going well, the transition "almost seamless." Williams is built to handle two campuses.
"I know Dr. Mathis is anxious," she says, "but we had strategic meetings for months to make this plan work right and it has."
Booker students are housed in the second-grade pod and learning cottages and have their own multipurpose room, while their Williams counterparts keep the main facility. Staggered school days—at Williams, breakfast starts at 7:30 a.m., classes at 8 a.m. and school is out at 2:35 p.m.; buses carrying Booker pupils arrive at 8:15 a.m. and classes end at 3:30 p.m.—have nixed cross traffic. Booker's bike racks are on the west side of the school, the same side parents of Booker children pick them up.
"It's not a bad situation," Mathis says. "The people at Wendell P. Williams are gracious. But just like everything else, people want to be in their own home."