KVIG Informative

Chaparral High School has served the same patch of east Las Vegas since 1973. Its replacement is already approved — and it’s being built smaller, on purpose, for a district that no longer has the students to fill the old one.

The Clark County School District’s Attendance Zone Advisory Commission began reviewing a proposal this month that would reassign parts of Chaparral High School’s attendance zone to Valley High School and Las Vegas High School, ahead of a planned rebuild of Chaparral’s aging campus.

Tracy Murphy, the district’s director of demographics, zoning and GIS, said Chaparral’s replacement building — to be constructed on the school’s existing site near Flamingo and Sandhill roads — will have capacity for about 1,800 students. The current 52-year-old building serves roughly 1,900 students on a campus originally designed to hold 2,500.

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Brandon McLaughlin, the district’s chief of facilities, said Chaparral’s relatively stable enrollment combined with its poor physical condition made the school a priority for rebuilding, even as the broader district pursues a strategy of shrinking its overall footprint. CCSD has already made repairs to the building’s infrastructure, including an electrical system upgrade, but district officials say the 52-year-old structure still needs more extensive fixes than patchwork maintenance can provide.

Under the proposed rezoning, Valley High School would also absorb small portions of the Clark, Rancho and Desert Pines attendance boundaries, a change district staff say is intended to better align school zones with elementary feeder patterns and use Interstate 15 as a clearer physical boundary line.

The rebuild is one of roughly 30 schools CCSD plans to reconstruct through 2035 under a broader facilities strategy the district has described as a “trade-up” plan — replacing aging buildings with smaller, modernized campuses sized for a shrinking student population rather than rebuilding at the same scale.

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The new Chaparral campus is targeted to open in time for the 2029-30 school year, according to district officials, meaning current Chaparral students will spend the rest of their high school careers in the same aging building the district has already deemed a priority for replacement.

CCSD is sizing its newest school for the district it expects to have in 2029, not the one it has today. Whether that’s a realistic bet on where enrollment is headed, or a smaller building locking in less capacity than a growing corner of the valley will eventually need again, isn’t something anyone will know for certain until the ribbon gets cut.