Las Vegas Grammar School built in 1910. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the old school building was used to house the district administrative offices. The site is now is occupied by the Foley Federal Building.
1960s & Early '70s
Helen J. Stewart School
Variety School
In the 1960s, children with special needs were enrolled in special schools: Helen J. Stewart School for mentally handicapped students, Variety School for physically handicapped students and John F. Miller School for severely handicapped students. In 2013 a newly constructed John F. Miller School Health Center was opened. It is one of the most sophisticated facilities in the nation and currently serves 140 students with special needs. Students range in age from 3 to 22 years. The facility is specifically designed to handle critical student medical emergencies as well as prolonged electrical outages due to weather or other community disaster. State of the art design and equipment provide a student centered environment for individualized care, where more than two hundred specialized procedures are performed daily with an emphasis on safety, hygiene and privacy. The RN in charge is Clark County school nurse Redstar Mello, who with her staff of 10 is guided by national protocols to provide care and handle emergencies.
In the early 1970s, the coordinating nurse was Lucille Bunker. The school district hired health clerks to help nurses with paper work, specifically to update student health cards and record screening data onto the file cards. The nursing staff numbered about 24 nurses.
All nurses continued under the supervision of non-nurses until the late 1980s.
John F Miller School
As the number of new enrolling students increased, nurses became more and more involved in identifying and referring children with complex health problems. Sometimes these children had never seen a doctor. Language barriers and limited resources tested the nurses’ creativity. The lack of privacy in school health offices was a barrier to effective work with children and parents, and often nurses had to search for any quiet, secluded place, sometimes resorting to a supply closet.