When Clark County School District officials decided against offering in-person options in the spring of 2020, the city of North Las Vegas began looking for a new way to educate students struggling with virtual learning due to a lack of technology or inability to stay on task without guidance.
Enter the Southern Nevada Urban Micro Academy (SNUMA), a free microschool for children in grades 1-8 that teaches a state-aligned curriculum led by licensed educators.
Don Soifer, president of Nevada Action for School Options, said his nonprofit worked with the city to provide a “first-of-its-kind public-private partnership for micro-schooling” designed to mitigate learning loss during the public health crisis.
The program, launched in the fall of 2020 using existing municipal facilities, opened a third location last week at Neighborhood Recreation Center to support its growing enrollment. The academy now provides more than 100 students with IT support, curriculum guidance and classroom technologies through assistance from Cadence Learning, a virtual learning platform company that provided content free of charge.
"North Las Vegas historically has been underserved, and there is an achievement gap. When we started the academy, we wanted to provide a solution for our kids that would allow them to overcome a number of challenges and close that gap,” Soifer said. “We knew we were working with the children who needed us most.”
North Las Vegas is Nevada’s largest city with the highest concentration of students of color, many of whom are considered economically disadvantaged. For some students, the remote model simply was not conducive to learning, even with access to a device and Internet.
Absences immediately increased when the district switched to distance learning last spring, according to the academy. Nearly 40 percent of students who never logged in were from North Las Vegas zip codes. On the first day of the fall semester, a quarter of those absences were from North Las Vegas, which makes up roughly 10 percent of the county population.
Local leaders feared that many of the city’s students would fall through the cracks, widening an existing achievement gap. Councilwoman Pamela Goynes-Brown, a champion of the program and retired educator, said she knew the city needed to explore other options.
“It was just important to us that we did something to ensure that our kids are getting some kind of normalcy in their life, and the micro-school just fell upon us,” she said. “It worked well, and it’s still working well.”
Soifer said the program was able to “provide some the most effective teaching and learning our learners and their families have ever experienced for a small fraction of the cost of the per-pupil funding in the district.” So far, the project has cost the city a little over $320,000 in CARES Act funding.
“We spent that money on our constituents. It was to help them so that we do have a society that can function even during the pandemic,” Goynes-Brown added.
According to the academy, small class sizes capped at 15 students per pod enable social distancing and individualized guidance. The school is free for students in North Las Vegas and children of essential workers and first responders throughout the county.
Children must temporarily leave the public school system and be designated as homeschooled students to enroll.
“I think the biggest obstacle we faced was gaining the trust of our parents because it wasn’t an easy decision...,” Goynes-Brown noted.
Dawn Kearney, a mother of twins Brooklyn and Breeana, decided to send her kids to one of the schools located in the Silver Mesa Rec Center earlier this semester after they struggled with remote learning in the fall. She said her only regret was “not sending them sooner.”
Students like Brooklyn and Breeana had trouble navigating ed-tech programs without consistent support. Even with access to technology, Kearney said many adults find virtual platforms cumbersome. Kearney wondered, “How can you expect a fourth-grader to maneuver through this?”
She has already noticed an improvement in the two fourth-graders, most notably with writing assignments.
“Honestly, they’ve been doing more there than they did with Clark County from August to December,” she said. “For me, it’s peace of mind knowing there’s an actual teacher there helping them.”
Students are assessed for their strengths and weaknesses upon enrolling. The academy claims students like Kearney’s have made significant academic strides since opening in the fall of 2020.
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78 percent of students arrived below grade level in reading. Sixty-two percent of children now are at or above grade level.
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93 percent of children arrived below grade level in math. All students are now working on material that is at least at grade level.
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Nearly 75 percent were reading below grade level, while 42 percent are now at grade level and 28 percent are above grade level.
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Over 70 percent of third-graders entered the academy testing below grade level in math. Fifty-seven percent are currently working at grade level and 43 percent are working above grade level.
