CCSD short by more than 1,300 teachers as students return to class Monday

By Hillary Davis (contact)

Sunday, Aug. 7, 2022 | 2 a.m.

With less than a week to go before the first day of school, Bailey Middle School Principal Darryl Wyatt dissolved 10 class sections of science.

He had no choice.

The classes were supposed to be the workload of two full-time teachers, but after having the positions open for six months with no takers, he had to make other plans. His remaining science teachers absorbed the roughly 300 displaced students into their class rosters.

The northeast Las Vegas school is down eight teachers to start the school year on Monday as part of 1,372 classroom teacher vacancies across the Clark County School District.

Each school facing an educator deficit is making accommodations to limit the effect on learning, but as Wyatt can attest the gymnastics of managing his teacher roster is a challenge. The unfilled positions at Bailey mean raising the science class sizes from about 28 to 40 students, and requiring all eighth-graders to take their required health class online from a computer lab on campus.

Staffing has never been this bad in CCSD. While it’s fluctuated significantly over the past 10 years, the district started last year with about 700 classroom vacancies, according to district data. It had 352 in 2012.

Wyatt said last year was “horrific” for staffing — and not just for unfilled positions. Some teachers had to call out sick as the COVID-19 pandemic dragged on, spiking so hard in January that CCSD canceled classes for two days.

This year, Wyatt predicts, will be worse yet for staffing. “I definitely think we’re going to be in for a very long year,” he said.

It’s hard to parse how many kids will not be taught by a fully certified permanent teacher with the qualifications to teach that subject. Teacher rosters vary widely by grade level, subject, how many class sections they have, if they’re in middle or high school, location or whether they’re in special education.

Elementary schools had 685 teacher openings as of late last week, according to figures from the School Board. If every one of those teachers were to teach 25-30 students, that’s 17,125 to 20,550 pupils who will arrive Monday without a permanent teacher.

The problem isn’t limited to Las Vegas; 3,000 teacher jobs are unfilled in Nevada’s 17 school districts, according to the Washington Post. And across the nation, school districts are getting creative — four-day school week in rural Texas or using college students in Arizona — to fill the void.

Many of the Clark County district’s 366 schools don’t have any vacancies. But others are deep in the red for human capital. Superintendent Jesus Jara calls it a crisis of inequality.

“The crisis is not only that we have a lack of teachers across the board,” Jara said. “The crisis is exacerbated because I have my neediest kids that… don’t have adults.”

The district said in June that more than 25 schools had permanent teacher vacancy rates of at least 20 to 40%, and most of them were high-poverty schools.

According to CCSD’s recruiting website, the district had about 1,450 certified openings as of Thursday, a figure that included professionals like nurses, social workers and nonclassroom teachers who help their classroom colleagues develop lessons and techniques in fundamental academic areas such as reading.

Under this expanded definition, but not including support staff like custodians, clerical staff and classroom aides, some high schools had 17 openings. One North Las Vegas elementary school had 15. A small elementary school in the Historic Westside had 12.

Brian Redmond, director of recruitment for CCSD’s human resources department, said the district had more than 1,100 new teachers ready to go on Monday, up from the 883 that the district recognized at its July 28 new-hire welcome breakfast.

But with employee churn, the district will recruit every day, year-round, especially in the northeast valley, where vacancies concentrate, Redmond said.

CCSD will start traveling out of state to recruit. One of its planned trips: a September math teacher conference expected to draw educators from around the country to Los Angeles.

Jara said the district’s newly increased minimum salary for teachers from $43,000 to $50,000 annually has ignited some interest, and he acknowledged that veteran teachers needed a raise next. He doesn’t have a dollar figure for what the state should allot for that, but conceptually, he said, lawmakers need to ask, “How much do we value K-12 education in the state of Nevada?”

John Vellardita, executive director of the Clark County Education Association — the union representing more than 18,000 CCSD teachers— said the base salary increase has made a difference. It could be higher, he said, and the more experienced teachers need a raise too, to keep them in Clark County.

“What’s the magic number? I think it depends on who it is,” he said. “But we’re not going to engage in sloganeering and suggest that X amount is going to solve the problem.”

He said the union would bring the tandem issues of state funding and beefing up Nevada’s teacher preparation pipelines to the Nevada Legislature when lawmakers convene this winter. Any results will not be immediate.

“I don’t think it’s simply, what’s the magic number to pay salaries and benefits to attract people and to retain people,” he said. “I think the problem is systemic, in the sense that we have a significant shortage that money on salaries and benefits (alone) is not going to solve. And that’s the pipeline issue.”

But today, CCSD needs about 1,400 teachers.

Some openings will be canceled out by redistributing students into classes that have a certified teacher, such as with Bailey’s science predicament — though that comes with larger class sizes.

Students could learn semi-independently on a computer. Wyatt, the Bailey Middle School principal, describes this with some rue as his answer to not having a health teacher. Since the state requires health to advance to high school, Wyatt has to place his entire eighth grade in classes of about 40 at a time to take health on computers, using the same virtual format that children take to recover credits if they previously failed. A substitute, who is not a health education specialist, will assist, Wyatt said.

Teachers may split time between schools. With no band teacher for the second consecutive year at Bailey and the job not advertised anymore among the school’s eight postings, Wyatt brought the program back this year after his colleague at nearby Sunrise Mountain High School shared his band teacher for a couple of periods a day.

Many students will start the year with fill-in teachers, who may be in the classroom indefinitely. That could include traditional substitutes, a rotation of teachers elsewhere in the school who work through their preparation periods, or even a school administrator. Administrators from the central office may also be asked to step in, Jara said.

But when you start taking officials away from other duties, services to students become stretched thin.

Take school administrators, such as an assistant principal, whose days also include tasks such as crowd control in the cafeteria and assisting students to their bus in the rush after school.

For CCSD schools, the typical substitute has been hard to come by for the last couple of years. Substitute fulfillment rates districtwide plunged from about 82% in the 2019-20 year pre-pandemic to 62% after the return to in-person teaching in 2021, to 54% last school year, the district said.

Teachers and administrators are now emailing, calling and pleading on social media for substitutes, who received a raise of at least $30 a day this year to pick up assignments in high-poverty schools. Subs who take assignments at schools where at least 75% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch can earn between $150 and $200 a day, depending on if they commit to short-term, long-term or indefinite “vacancy” assignments. Before the raise, all subs made at least $110 a day.

“I wish you could see my inbox,” said Brandon Summers, a substitute teacher and professional musician who can stay busy just focusing on orchestra classes. “Subs right now are being inundated with emails from schools that need teacher positions filled. Inundated.”

The teacher crisis is firmly on the radar of Gov. Steve Sisolak, who in a back-to-school message to families said, “I want to reassure families and schools that we are working hard to make sure every child in every classroom in every community gets a great education. That goal has never wavered since I’ve been in office and it never will.”