COLUMN ONE : A Deck Stacked Against the Young : Teen suicide, pregnancy and violence plague fast-growing Nevada. State’s big dreams have gone bust for many children.

The present only seems to be bright in the garish glow of the Las Vegas Strip, and the future really has Chris Webster worried.

Curfew started for local teen-agers an hour ago, but they are just beginning to appear, cruising by Circus Circus casino in shiny cars with blaring music, hanging out with friends and laughing at tourists with active cameras.

“See all the cars going up and down the strip?” asks a cold and bored Webster, 18, as he loiters with friends outside McDonald’s. “There’s nothing else to do in Vegas. . . . if you don’t have, like, a car, a whole bunch of money or at least a job.”

Webster, an expert in diminished expectations, lacks all of the above and then some.

Skills: Dubious.

Education: Over, without a diploma.

Job prospects: Nil, save for minimum wage.

Long-term plans: To go back to Florida, where he last lived.

Short-term plans: To stay out of trouble.

“I had two friends shot,” he says. “They were 16. They’re dead.”

Webster may not be your typical teen-ager, but then Nevada is no average childhood home. Frontier State, Silver State, Gambling State, Nevada always was designed more for the young at heart than the young in fact. Today, as it lures families to new resorts and master-planned neighborhoods, the nation’s fastest-growing state can be hard on children.

Near the bottom in population, with just 1.4 million residents, it almost always makes the Top 10 in terms of trouble: teen-age suicide, teen-age pregnancy, violent death among the young, high school dropouts, lack of prenatal care.

Nevada’s 24-hour lifestyle, centered on casinos and hotels, is one culprit in making life difficult for young people here. “The parents, if they work at night, they’re not home with their children,” said Anna Apodaca, a teacher’s aide in Las Vegas schools. “The kids are basically left on their own.”

But social scientists lay the greatest blame for Nevada’s woes and the ills of its children on a decade of rapid growth and the shallow roots put down by many newcomers. Drawn by jobs in the burgeoning gambling economy, about 6,000 residents pour into the state each month, the vast majority to the expanding urban sprawl of Las Vegas. Schools cannot be built nor teachers hired fast enough to absorb the children of arrivals.

The old heart of Las Vegas is surrounded by a ring of prosperous new suburban communities, all red-tile roofs and mini-malls stretching into the desert. For those who come with a down payment and a good job, Las Vegas can be a dream destination. But for those who arrive without such security, the boom town optimism fades quickly.

Friends are recent, family distant and neighborhoods too new or too poor to provide much of a safety net. New arrivals find the slide down the economic ladder faster and the climb back harder.

“In this town, neighborhoods are either brand-new or decayed and trying to recover from that,” says Mel Phillips, director of the Family Cabinet, a social service organization. “There is no stable neighborhood . . . no sense of neighborhood.”

With unchecked growth and little stability, this is what you get:

* Teen-agers here attempt suicide at a rate twice the national average, according to the Nevada Suicide Study. “Our teen-agers are identifying themselves as victims of extreme stress,” Roger Simon, executive director of a northern Nevada suicide prevention center, told the state Legislature. “They need help to cope and to stay alive.” Starting this school year, the state has made classes in suicide prevention a requirement for high school graduation.

* Nevada was the No. 2 state for teen-age pregnancies in 1990, the most recent year for which comparative statistics were available. School buses headed to certain Las Vegas campuses are fitted for use with baby seats--protection for the children of children, sharing a ride to class in the morning.

* In the rush to accommodate the recent flood of students, the school district that serves the Las Vegas region added 900 extra teachers in the last school year. The district built 57 of its 187 schools in the past four years, more than any system in the nation, and 25 more are on the way. Still, many elementary schools run double sessions, with one shift of students arriving at 7 a.m. and another heading home in evening darkness.

* Turnover in schools is high, making it harder for students to form deep relationships with classmates and teachers. Statewide, the student transiency rate is nearly 30% in elementary schools--meaning 3 in 10 youngsters leave school during the year. High transiency is closely related to low achievement and giving up on school. The state has the highest percentage of teen-agers ages 16 to 19 who have not completed high school, and the dropout rate is rising.

* Nevada ranks sixth in the nation in the rate of violent juvenile deaths, according to a report published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The survey, which measures the living conditions of U.S. children, concludes that the condition of Nevada’s children dropped in nine of 10 categories between 1985 and 1991.

Some of Nevada’s troubles arise from the kinds of people lured here by the promises of a new life and plentiful jobs. Some were marginally employable back home, came here with little schooling or training and ended up disappointed by the reality of low salaries and strange hours.

“This is not the Silicon Valley,” says Maria Chiarez, director of the Horizon Project, an alternative high school program helping teens complete their education. “We’re not drawing Ph.D.s from Harvard and Davis. This is a working-class area.”

Like most of her classmates at Lunt Elementary School, 4-year-old Bianca Sosa’s parents worked hellish hours in smoky casinos to make ends meet. They moved to Las Vegas from Juarez, Mexico, in 1987, early in the city’s boom. Her father waits tables at the Golden Nugget from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., then goes to a day job running a dental lab. Bianca’s mother, Blanca, worked at a variety of casinos, rising from change girl to front desk attendant, often working from 4 p.m. to midnight.

Six months ago, Blanca quit to stay home, trading income for family stability. Her children were home alone for too many hours in a city she considers “the end of the world: shootings, drugs, kids out of control.”

“And Bianca was staying at home once a week for four hours alone with my husband, but he had to sleep,” she said. “I was very, very worried. We decided I had to quit.”

Lunt Elementary, a crowded 5-year-old campus in a poor northeast neighborhood, is in some ways a microcosm of the problems facing many schools in Las Vegas. It has a high poverty rate, a growing percentage of students who speak Spanish as their first language, and a transiency rate of 41%, well above the state norm.

Bianca Sosa is enrolled in a special preschool program for youngsters considered at risk of educational failure. Each 4-year-old gets free meals and special attention--an early stab at lowering the state’s high dropout rate.

“Last year I had 75 students,” said Ola Holliway, who teaches in a special program at Lunt. “I lost maybe half of them during the year . . . We have students who come in and maybe stay two, three weeks. It stops them from learning. They miss a lot.”

Tammy Schleppegrell, 16, has had a peripatetic education for a different reason. Durango High is the first school she has attended for longer than a year in Las Vegas. She hasn’t moved since arriving from Hawaii in 1988; rather, redistricting to accommodate new campuses is to blame for her constant uprooting from friends and teachers.

On a recent Friday night, Tammy was one of a smattering of students cheering on the Durango Trailblazers in a basketball game at rival Rancho High.

“They brought (the overflow from) two schools together to form Durango,” she says of her gleaming 1-year-old campus, which serves the exclusive Spanish Trails development. “There was a lot of tension. People aren’t sure they like the school. There really is no school spirit. . . . We have a big absence problem. I guess people feel like they have no place in school.”

When Tammy is not at a school event, she’s likely to head over to Circus Circus, which beckons pink and prohibited. Although those under 21 are not allowed in casinos or bars, local youths come to play video games in the hotel’s arcade, collect phone numbers from prospective dates and elude security guards. Teen-agers with out-of-town IDs can be on the Strip after 9 p.m., but locals can’t.

Security guard Steve Mahler, 21, has trouble telling them apart, even though he spent his own Friday nights not long ago cruising the same turf. Two hours after the Durango-Rancho game, he is chasing off younger incarnations of himself. “Las Vegas,” he says, as he watches the ritual, “is for adults.”

It is also for children who like to pretend, like Mindy Davison, 17. To this fledgling woman of the world, Circus Circus is already stale. Hanging in the McDonald’s parking lot next door, laughing at the picture-taking tourists, got old fast.

“You can only go to the same place so many times,” says the high school student and mother of one. “I like to do the older stuff, go to Excalibur and watch the bands. I’m not supposed to be there. If you’re just riding around, they stop you. We get stopped all the time.”

When Davison moved to Las Vegas in 1989, it was her sixth home in 12 years. Her education here has been just as tumultuous: four schools in five years. A difficult combination of risk and nonchalance, she has dropped out of school once. Of the social workers who hounded her back, she screws up her face and says, “Leave me alone. I’ll just go back and repeat the year. It’s not gonna kill me.”

At the request of the state department of health, the federal Centers for Disease Control came to Nevada in the early 1990s to explore why the suicide rate was higher for people of all ages than anywhere in the country.

Dr. Patrick Meehan, who led the Nevada Suicide Study, came up with few answers. But he did discover that children who had recently moved had a higher rate of suicide than others did. “Mobility is an issue,” says Meehan, now director of public health for the state of Georgia.

As Las Vegas races toward the million mark--a population milestone expected early next year--it is rapidly becoming the kind of city its new residents left behind when they moved. There are traffic jams, air pollution and gangs; violent crime jumped 11.7% statewide between 1988 and 1992, according to the FBI.

But crimes involving school-age children grew at an even faster rate. Between 1982 and 1990, the number of Clark County children charged with crimes rose 70%, according to the county Department of Family and Youth Services; the number of school-age children rose only 40%. At the same time, child abuse and neglect complaints rose 27%.

Children here are increasingly likely to be touched by violence--as victims or victimizers. Shamika Brown, 14, has been both.

Once upon a time, she had seven sisters and brothers, but two, she says with a coolness born of pain, “are deceased.” Natasha, 3, burned to death when Shamika was 1. LaDonna, 19, was stabbed to death while being robbed about two years ago. A brother was shot three times--twice in the leg and once in the arm. Shamika herself was arrested for robbery and grand theft auto.

“I’d like to live in Mississippi, where my mama is from,” says the North Las Vegas girl, who attends a self-esteem program for first-time offenders. “It seems like someone gets killed here every day.”

Homelessness is also up--a factor that is reflected in the city’s schools. From a low of “a couple hundred” in the early 1980s, the population of homeless children in the Clark County School District has mushroomed to about 1,800, says Kay Carl, assistant superintendent for elementary education.

One block of famous Las Vegas Boulevard, far from the neon of the glitzier Strip, is lined with full homeless shelters. Crossroads, the city’s only shelter for intact families, has a 12-family waiting list for each cramped but clean room. St. Vincent Shelter, created for single men, this month broke its record for housing families--13 at once, crammed into 22 beds and a crib. A school bus is a regular visitor; it pulls away from Shelter Row more full every day.

At 5:30 on a recent morning at St. Vincent, Helen Ostrander curled her body around her sleeping children, warding off the day for just a few more moments. Leah, 9, fresh from the emergency room after an evening spent vomiting blood, had the porcelain face of a feverish child--red lips, white skin, furrowed brow.

She will remain asleep when the lights blink on and the hundreds of men and clusters of families stretch and scratch and cough and sigh their way to consciousness. Her brother Jesse, 11 this day, bounds from the communal cot like a birthday boy. The celebration cake is a breakfast doughnut in a shelter dining room.

Five years ago, Jesse, Leah and their mother moved to this boom town for a better life. What they found instead was a difficult city: high rents and low vacancy rates, high employment but low salaries. In an increasingly familiar Nevada story, the respiratory technician turned substitute teacher became an indigent mother of two.

Jesse came home the other day in a brand new Mighty Morphin Power Rangers jacket and a pair of spotless LA Gear high tops, compliments of the Clark County schools. Helen Ostrander is glad of the help for her children, but could use a little help for herself. A job for starters, an affordable home where she can close the door and be alone with her children, where the only smells are the Ostranders’ own.

“When I got here,” she says, “I was an aspiring professional, and now I’m a homeless indigent. It’s the backbreaking effort of paying the rent. Salaries are unbelievably low, and rents are astronomical, and in between you have to feed your family.”

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Growing Pains

The Las Vegas school system, which covers an area the size of Massachusetts, has the fastest-growing enrollment in the country. In the 1993-94 school year, the district hired 900 new teachers. If growth continues as projected, enrollment will triple between 1984 and 2003.

Enrollment 1984: 89,771 2003: 273,271 New Schools 1990: 15 1991: 18 1992: 8 1993: 13 1994: 3 1995: 9 1996: 8 1997: 4.5 1998: 4 Note: The 57 new schools indicated between 1990 and 1994 were opened in the years noted. For all schools in 1995 and after, construction is scheduled to begin in the years noted. Half schools connote the second phase of an existing campus.

Source: Clark County School District