Glenn Christenson is a CPA and businessman, who has been involved as a private citizen in trying to help education in Nevada. As the first leader of the LVGEA (Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance), he found…
“35% of the companies who aren’t coming to Las Vegas aren’t coming because of our education system or our workforce.”
He noted that Nevada has a smaller college-educated population than a lot of other major states.
Christenson was involved in the inception of Nevada State College. In 2016, he chaired the SAGE Commission - a legislative commission set up to look at the economic situation in public schools in Nevada.
He’s now chairman of the Leadership Institute of Nevada, which was spun off by Judy Steele from the Public Education Foundation, and just hired former Valley Principal Ramona Esparza as its first executive director.
He was the chair of the AB469 Implementation Council, which caused a bit of controversy at the time, as the Board of Trustees didn’t approve it.
He sees education from a different lens than educators do. I talked to him last week, as part of my exploration of how the bureaucracy of the school district should work.
We started off talking about the difference between Pat Skorkowsky - whom Christenson worked with to implement the reorg, and Jesus Jara.
Pat, he said, led with his heart, but couldn’t quite get what he wanted done. Jara opposes implementation of the reorg, which, for Christenson is problematic.
“I’m a strong believer in AB469. I think that decisions are best made, especially in a district this large, at the building level. And with those decisions you have buy-in, hopefully from the teachers, the parents, the administrative or the support staff. He would like, I think, more centralized control.
I suggested to Christenson that the way a school district is supposed to work - the way any bureaucracy is supposed to work - is that the board sets the vision and hires people to carry it out. CCSD’s board could very easily say, “Our vision is to have a non-centralized school system, where the power is shared with the schools and central in an environment where everything is open and transparent. And, we will focus on making sure that we have the best teachers working in the best conditions together. And then that will create better outcomes for students.”
We currently don’t do that. We just say the word “outcomes” and then don’t define a vision to get there. We also let more students than I am comfortable with graduate without being able to read. What CCSD does, and its board of trustees rubber stamps, is put out the numbers they want to have without any backing as to the truth of those numbers.
Christenson laughed at my example. of a school board vision, and noted the trustees sued the state in 2017 to stop the reorg from happening.
“None of those things that you mentioned were happening. The other thing that I would point out is it's the job of the trustees to provide oversight for, and as you say, vision, but I think in order to do that, you also have to have people with the right skill set.
“Keep in mind that the district is the largest employer in the state. It would be great to have someone with an HR background with a finance background, legal background, operational background, because you can bring those skills to the table then as you're looking at oversight. And not to say that there shouldn't be educators on there, cuz I, they should be. That's all part of it.”
Christenson thinks the best solution out there is to partially appoint the CCSD trustees.
It’s an interesting conversation. Give it a listen.
Here is the link to the Atlantic article I mentioned.
And here is the link to my piece on how Jara was hired.
A Conversation with Glenn Christenson on Vision, Leadership and School Systems