Clark County School District Superintendent Jesus Jara speaks with the Las Vegas Sun regarding the issues facing the school district, Friday June 14, 2019.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019 | 5:18 p.m.
Instead of eliminating dean positions next school year to make up for a projected budget shortfall, the Clark County School District will instruct middle and high schools to reduce their budgets by approximately $98 per pupil, Superintendent Jesus Jara announced today.
The news comes less than three weeks before the start of the 2019-20 school year and a month and a half after the district said it would cut 170 dean positions at middle and high schools to balance next year’s budget. The cost-cutting measure was sharply criticized by some administrators, teachers, students and members of the School Board of Trustees, some of whom threatened to try to overturn the superintendent’s decision.
Jara softened his stance at a school board meeting July 11, when he said he would reconsider whether dean positions should be cut. Since then, he has gathered input from teachers, administrators, support professionals and other stakeholders on how to balance the budget and cut costs, he said.
“The resounding message from all stakeholders, including teachers, support professionals, our principals and our community, was that the decision was best left to our principals along with our school organizational teams,” Jara said at a news conference today.
While cost-cutting measures will be left to leadership teams at middle and high schools, the district will not allow principals to make cuts that will increase class sizes or cut teachers or support professionals, Jara said. However, officials did not give specific examples for types of cuts that schools could make.
“Funding will follow the students,” Jara stressed.
Principals will still be permitted to cut deans, who oversee a range of administrative and supportive tasks including student discipline, if they choose to do so. The district will also continue transitioning to the use of student success instructional facilitators and to “a new approach to student discipline,” Jara said. It is not clear at this time if and when dean positions will be phased out of the district, he added.
Deans whose positions were cut were reassigned earlier this summer to teaching positions across the valley. Those teaching positions are now considered vacant once again, said Nadine Jones, chief of Human Resources for the district. In total, the district faces approximately 640 vacant teaching positions for next school year, plus vacancies due to deans no longer being moved to the classroom.
Shadow Ridge High School dean Cristal Boisseau said she feels relieved to know that she can go back to work with her same role and salary in August. But she noted that the district’s announcement today applies to the 2019-20 school year only. There remains an estimated $17 million budget shortfall for the 2020-21 school year.
“My interpretation of this is it’s just one year, and then in a year, there will be changes to the positions to come,” Boisseau said. “So we’ve got a year to look for other positions where there’s more stability.”
Anticipated budget cuts at each school will depend on the projected number of students enrolled next school year, according to the district’s budget adjustment calculations. For example, Lois and Jerry Tarkanian Middle School will lose $202,215, about $6,285 less than the monetary loss associated with cutting their deans. On the other hand, Global Community High School in North Las Vegas will lose $15,389; the school would not have been affected at all by the proposed dean cuts.
Principals will be able to view an updated strategic budget today and will be expected to come up with a plan for cutting costs by Tuesday.
Clark County Education Association president Vikki Courtney said she feels confident that the superintendent will make sure that principles “do what they’re supposed to do” when they determine budget cuts for next school year.
“As long as there aren’t cuts to teaching positions or teacher pay, the superintendent gets to make those decisions,” she said.
The teachers union, which has threatened to strike at the start of the school year if the district fell short on promised teacher raises or cut classroom resources, initially supported Jara’s decision to move deans from their current administrative roles to teaching roles.
Today’s news does not impact whether or not the union will strike, Courtney said, adding that contract negotiations are ongoing.
Even though the decision was reversed, Boisseau reiterated the “undue stress” that deans, their families, students and others in the district experienced in the last month and a half.
“The sense of morale in the school district without a doubt has been affected,” she said.
