From horses to high-tech classrooms: A 68-year-old CCSD school gets new life

Mountain View Elementary School was recently demolished, making way for a modern two-story facility designed to meet today’s educational needs. Mountain View is among 30-plus schools slated to be rebuilt across the valley by 2035.

In 1955, Las Vegas turned 50 years old. The valley was expanding and the population was steadily growing — and it was then when Mountain View Elementary School opened on the east side of town. 

The neighborhood and the school looked very different then, said  Cecilia Harge-French, principal of Mountain View Elementary School. 

“ It was a predominantly homogenous community. It was a rural part of Las Vegas. There were lots of horses,” Harge-French said. “I remember speaking to a person who was a [former] student here. She said she rode her horse here and that she would rope them up on something that they had for kids to put their horses on.”

Now, the only sign of a horse in the school is the mural of Manny the Mustang, the school mascot, at the front of the school, which was salvaged before the old school campus was demolished in 2023. 

At the end of the 2023 school year, more than 400 students at Mountain View were told to say goodbye to the 68-year-old building, that the next school year would be held at a temporary school nearby, and that a brand new school would be built. 

The new building was necessary because the old one was increasingly unreliable, said Assistant Principal Sandra Baeza. 

“We used to flood every time it rained,” Baeza said, adding that the old school’s layout included classroom buildings with outdoor hallways, making it challenging for kids to go to lunch or other activities in another building during adverse weather. 

“In order to go from point A to point B, they had to walk outside. They don’t have to do that as much,” Baeza told The Nevadan. “Before, it wasn’t covered, and we used pallets [on the floor] so the kids could walk and cross to go to the cafeteria and they didn’t get wet. So, we don’t miss that at all.”

Mountain View Elementary School (UNLV Special Collections)

The new school building is two stories, it has big windows that allow in sunlight, bright colors, and contains almost everything students need — a cafeteria, an auditorium/flex space, a library, and computer labs — and is designed so that rain or hazardous weather doesn’t impact their day. 

Mountain View also got a high-tech upgrade and now has Interactive Flat Panels (blackboard-sized touch screens to display lessons) in every classroom and enough Chromebooks for every student, Harge-French said. 

“One of the things that the old building didn’t allow us to do was if we wanted to use Chromebooks, we had to wheel these carts and pray to God that they didn’t tip over because the outdoor hallways were a little uneven and rocky,” Harge-French said. “I mean, something built in 1955 is not ADA-compliant, and it’s also not going to be computer cart compliant.”

The make-over at Mountain View is just the start of CCSD’s plans to modernize its school buildings. 

During the 2015 state Legislative session, two bills passed allowing CCSD to construct new schools and renovate existing schools with funding from a bond program that was estimated to provide $4.1 billion in funds for the Capital Improvement Program over a 10-year period. After revision, the bond program is now estimated at more than $7.7 billion. 

Thanks to that funding, the district is demolishing and rebuilding more than 30 aging schools over the next decade in order to meet the needs of students, with upgraded buildings that are indoors, have new technology, new playgrounds, and more flex spaces.  

The first four elementary schools in the “replacement” plan reopened at the start of the 2024-2025 school year, and six schools are being worked on this year — three elementary schools and three middle schools. 

A “replacement school” refers to an existing school that is completely demolished and rebuilt with a new facility on the same site as part of the district’s Capital Improvement Program. The 30 schools on the list to be replaced through 2034-2035 school year are older, built when the Las Vegas valley was first developing, and showed signs of aging and a need for updated infrastructure, according to CCSD. 

Mountain View Elementary School’s new campus ribbon cutting. (Courtesy of Clark County School District)

“We have more usable space now than we did before. We have more space for students and for staff to do things on. But it’s not as spread out as it was before, we’re compact,” Harge-French said, adding that teachers used to have to park at a church across the street, the school bus drop-off and pick-up area was simply in the neighborhood which often caused issues with residents.

The school now has “its own space.” 

“So now we have the bus loop in the front so that it doesn’t conflict with the residents anymore,” Harge-French said. “In general, we were sharing space with the church. We were sharing space with the neighbors. Now everything is housed on campus, which is great. Because even last year, we were sharing with three other schools.”

Harge-French also said that since the school’s old field was considered a park, safety and trespassing were a concern. 

“Safety is another thing. We have an amazing camera system. We can see everything. I love that part. We have about 47 and before, we used to have maybe five, but only one worked,” the principal said.  

While the upgrades represented a huge boon for the school, the year the school was closed did come with some downsides. Mountain View lost about dozens of students, Harge-French said, because some parents didn’t realize that the school would reopen. According to the Department of Education, Mountain View has 361 students enrolled, the majority of whom are Hispanic or Latino. 

“ We lost a lot of students, unfortunately, because, our parents weren’t empowered to know all of the phases that you go through,” the principal said. “Some of them went to other schools and said, ‘Our school is gone and so we have to go to another school.’ Which is unfortunate for us, but they’re slowly coming back. They’re starting to see that we’re here and what we have to offer. People often forget about the eastside, but we’re here, these kids are here.”

Keeping history alive 

Las Vegas is no stranger to tearing buildings down and building something new, but history tends to get lost in the process. 

Harge-French was keenly aware of this risk and worked to ensure Mountain View’s history wasn’t left behind. 

She said it was a challenge finding information and old photos of the school, but was ultimately able to find old newspaper clippings which she turned into a permanent display on a bulletin board to keep the school’s history alive.

“A lot of the history went down with the school and not a whole lot of records on what was. It took us a minute to try to figure out a lot of the things that you’re looking at right now [on the board] — the history is with people in the community that are no longer here,” Harge-French said.  “When we did our ribbon cutting, we had to dig and search — like we couldn’t find but three people who were former students to come and be part of the ribbon ceremony.”