Firefighter Jason Douglas / Clark County Public Information Office via AP
This image provided by the Clark County, Nev., Public Information Office shows flood damage, Monday, Aug. 21, 2023, outside Lundy Elementary School in the Old Town section of Mount Charleston near Las Vegas.
Sunday, June 9, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Mount Charleston residents and their allies say the Clark County School District is keeping them in the dark on a proposal to permanently shutter the rural community’s tiny but beloved elementary school, continuing to bus children as young as kindergarten an hour and a half each way to school in Indian Springs.
CCSD sent Earl B. Lundy Elementary School parents a letter last month saying that district officials recommend closing the two-room schoolhouse in the mountain village of Old Town “due to the expense of rebuilding the school from the storms and flooding caused by Tropical Storm Hilary in August 2023.” Conservatively, repairs could cost at least $3.5 million, the district says.
The building, though, is still standing. And some members of the Mount Charleston community say their requests for detailed information describing the structure’s condition have not been fulfilled.
Abraham Camejo, a member of the CCSD bond oversight committee who acts as a liaison with the district’s construction management office, said his interactions with CCSD over Lundy are “more complicated than they should be.”
The bond oversight committee confers with administrative staff and advises the school board on planning and funding school development — building, replacing or renovating schools.
“Having a community not being properly informed, and then possibly putting it on an agenda for closure without having these discussions, or even having the superintendent herself come to one of our (Bond Oversight Committee) meetings and giving us a very simple PowerPoint presentation on why the school should be closed” is insufficient, he said. “Was it damaged? Was it condemned? Who did the safety reports? When did a third-party engineering firm go out there and assess the damage?”
He said the committee chair requested a campus tour from district higher-ups. They were denied.
Chris Giunchigliani, a 42-year mountain resident, retired CCSD special education teacher and longtime citizen legislator who served in both the Nevada Assembly and the Clark County Commission, has also requested records. She was pointed.
“If you got damaged from the flood, prove it,” she said. “Give us the documentation.”
Lundy enrolled 11 to 13 students in kindergarten through fifth grade in the 2022-2023 school year, according to district enrollment records. It has served Mount Charleston children since 1965. Mountain residents say the school also serves as a community center, previously hosting chili cook-offs, fall festivals and caucus voting.
The disconnect between CCSD and the mountain community was pronounced Friday, when the district held an informational meeting on next steps. But there was one problem: The meeting, like where school is proposed to be hosted moving forward, was a 90-minute drive away in Indian Springs.
Kids want to go back
The district recommends sending Mount Charleston grade-school children to Indian Springs Elementary School, about 40 miles away from Lundy’s Yellow Pine Road campus. Displaced Lundy students had already been redirected to Indian Springs this year, and had long gone on to the Indian Springs school complex for middle and high school.
Camejo is a father of six. He doesn’t live on the mountain but if he did, he said he wouldn’t feel comfortable putting his younger children on such a long bus ride.
“We would probably opt out and do home-schooling,” he said.
That’s what the Hickam family did.
Sarah Hickam’s son had just started second grade at Lundy when the storm hit. She said CCSD abruptly told parents post-storm that children would be sent to Indian Springs and that the bus would come at 6 a.m.
She saw crews at Lundy, cleaning up and apparently making some repairs last fall, then heard nothing.
Hickam’s son rode the bus to Indian Springs for two months before he couldn’t take it anymore and she pulled him out to home-school him — a natural fit since she works from home as a teacher for an online charter school.
“He was very emotional all the time. He was angry,” she said. “He just wasn’t the kid I knew.”
Without the school, which Hickam’s son had attended since kindergarten, she said her family has listed its home for sale.
She said she trusted Lundy, but she doesn’t think her son would get the same care and attention at another CCSD school. When they move off the mountain, she may continue to home-school.
Hickam said that when they pass the locked-up school, her son says he wants to go back.
All the kids on the mountain say that, she said.
“They all don’t understand what happened,” she said. “They’re all sad.”
Insurance doesn’t cover all
Hilary dumped rain on the urban and suburban areas around Las Vegas but slammed the mountains west of the city harder. Roaring flash floods destroyed roads and trails along Mount Charleston and knocked out other critical infrastructure, like running water in homes.
Clark County Emergency Management led the local Hilary response. A county spokeswoman said that because the damage did not meet the threshold for government financial disaster assistance, CCSD did not coordinate remediation efforts with the county.
Nevada Division of Emergency Management Chief Dave Fogerson explained that the Federal Emergency Management Agency set the threshold for public assistance at $10,412,120 in uninsured, publicly owned infrastructure claims for all of Clark County. Uninsured damages did not meet this threshold, meaning taxpayer relief was not necessary because public infrastructure was sufficiently insured. (Lundy is insured.)
In September, CCSD contracted with Las Vegas’ Ethos Three Architecture to evaluate and document flood damage to provide potential repair and mitigation recommendations, according to a brief notification the school board received alerting them of the $124,500 expense of the evaluation. CCSD also spent about $121,000 to have construction workers shore up damage outside the building and haul away debris later in the fall.
The Ethos Three Architecture inspectors evaluated the site’s geotechnical, civil, structural mechanical and electrical engineering, plumbing, and architecture, according to the notification.
A CCSD spokesman told the Sun on Friday that the district estimates it would cost $3.5 million to $6 million to repair the existing building. Insurance would only cover $1.5 million of that — and of that claim value, only half would be available for actual repairs.
The other half is eaten up by the insurance deductible, the engineering assessment and shoring up the obliterated parking lot. That would leave CCSD on the hook for $2.75 million to $5.25 million. The possible cost to rebuild from scratch is unknown.
Mount Charleston Town Advisory Board member Brenda Talley said representatives from utility companies, police and fire agencies, and the U.S. Forest Service regularly came by the community in the immediate aftermath of the storm, although she said she only saw school district employees twice. The last residents heard, Lundy would reopen after winter break. But by January, residents hadn’t heard more about the school.
She said the town advisory board tapped its connections with the county government, which oversees the board, to get reports from CCSD. They invited district officials to the advisory board’s meetings. Minutes show that CCSD never came.
The May parent letter, from Interim Superintendent Brenda Larsen-Mitchell, was the first communication in months, Talley said.
“I think they have shown a total lack of respect, empathy and concern for what that community has gone through,” said Talley, who has previously worked for CCSD as a substitute teacher and served as a president of the Nevada PTA. “Because it wasn’t just the school. A library was hit, a fire station had a lot of damage, a lot of our homes. People lost cars. And our roads. It was a very traumatic experience.”
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