Eva G. Simmons, shown in her home in North Las Vegas Friday, Feb. 5, 2021, was one of the first Black administrators in the Clark County School District.
Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2021 | 2 a.m.
When a retired teacher visited Eva G. Simmons Elementary School to read to students, the children were fascinated upon learning her name — Eva G. Simmons.
"They couldn't believe that she was actually a real person," said Christina Hardeman, an administrator at the school in North Las Vegas.
Starting in the mid-1960s, Simmons, 82, worked for the Clark County School District for 37 years as a teacher, principal and area superintendent, among other positions.
The School Board decided in 2001 to name a school after Simmons, who is Black and helped pave the way for other women of color to take on leadership roles in the district.
"I'm very grateful to be able to work in a school under the name of someone who had such a great impact," Hardeman said.
When she first became a teacher, Simmons was assigned to teach at Mountain View Elementary School in a white part of town. But after she submitted a picture of herself as required then, she was reassigned to Madison Elementary, a school in a Black neighborhood that is now called Wendell P. Williams Elementary.
At the time, Black teachers were assigned to majority-Black schools, regardless of their background in education, Simmons said. Simmons had a bachelor's degree in health and physical education, but she was assigned to teach first grade.
Simmons, who got her degree from the University of Texas in Austin, where she grew up, also later taught at Lois Craig and Jo Mackey elementary schools.
Simmons earned her master's degree in curriculum and instruction from UNLV and became a team leader for Teacher Corps, a federal program to improve teaching in low-income schools. As part of the program, she recruited and mentored other teachers.
Not long after Simmons became a teacher, the NAACP sued the School District for failing to desegregate schools. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered all school districts be desegregated in 1954, but CCSD didn't implement a mandatory desegregation plan until the 1970s.
Simmons recalled that students in the Black schools were given “the used, written-in, pages-torn-out books … That's a down-South thing, but somehow it found its way to Las Vegas.”
When Simmons was assigned to oversee a program to provide supplies and materials to low-income schools, she found the resources were being sent to schools that didn’t need them. “I had to clean that up,” she said.
A short time later, she was named principal at Lois Craig Elementary and then an assistant personnel manager helping recruit Black administrators and coaching teachers on how to advance.
"The stepping stone was a dean's position or a curriculum advisor position, where a teacher could get experiences beyond the classroom as a step moving toward being an administrator," Simmons said.
Simmons eventually became superintendent of the School District’s southwest region.
She helped found a program for Black high school girls to promote self-esteem and sisterhood. Les Femmes Douze has awarded more than $500,000 in college scholarships to about 1,000 girls since it was established in 1964.
Simmons still supports teachers at the school that bears her name.
Each year, she gives teachers gift cards to buy classroom supplies, and shortly after schools shut down in March because of the pandemic, she sent the teachers boxed lunches.
