Wednesday, April 18, 2018 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
View more of the Sun's opinion section
An April 10 story in the Review-Journal noted that the Clark County School District “has not increased contributions for health care since 2008, aside from a one-time payment in 2016. The district has countered that the union has chosen to put newly available funds toward teacher salaries rather than health care coverage in contract talks.”
What new funds? Is CCSD implying that teachers should have to choose between health care and raises? There have been two years in the past decade that teachers got decent raises in Clark County, and there were no cost-of-living raises for seven years in a row.
In 2011, the number of students scoring the maximum score on the Advanced Placement Calculus AB exam at Arbor View High School increased from one to 11, and the total number of passing scores increased from seven to 24. The teacher got a pay cut for those results and so did every other teacher in CCSD that year.
While CCSD is being recognized nationally for its AP scores, it is attempting to circumvent the decision of a mutually agreed upon arbitrator to pay teachers their promised raises.
Nevada has some of the lowest per-pupil funding in the nation. West Virginia and Oklahoma are raising their funding, and other states like Arizona are not far behind. CCSD should be fighting to publicize this fact instead of decimating the morale of teachers who have some of the largest class sizes in the United States.
