Clark County Schools Superintendent Jesus Jara attends a School Board meeting at the district’s Education Center Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021. The board voted 4-3 to terminate Jara’s contract.
Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2021 | 2 a.m.
Clark County School District documents obtained by the Sun support ousted Superintendent Jesus Jara’s contention that raises he granted to his executive staff were designed to make the district competitive with other major school districts in the country.
The documents, obtained through a public records request, include some of Jara’s notes and a multimarket study showing the process of examining the raises well preceded his abrupt Oct. 28 firing. School Board members were fully briefed on the plans and the reasoning behind the raises, according to Jara’s notes, and planning for the raises was nearly complete during late summer or early fall.
After Jara was ousted, he announced a series of raises for CCSD cabinet members, which he is empowered to do unilaterally. Despite extending his contract over the summer, the board terminated Jara for unexplained reasons by a 4-3 vote, which cited “convenience” as the sole rationale for its actions.
The board on Thursday will review, and perhaps, rescind the firing.
A few days after his termination, CCSD documents were provided to the Sun detailing the substantial raises for cabinet members, all of whom signed onto a letter to the board opposing his firing. The combination wrongly gave the impression that the executives supported their leader in exchange for raises.
A memo to the trustees from Jara, also in the communications received by the Sun, criticized unnamed board members for the earlier leak and implied it was designed to tarnish what was a normal administrative process to recruit and maintain top talent.
Here’s how documents show the salary adjustments went behind the scenes:
According to the salary data, which CCSD gathered in August and shared with the Sun in response to a public records request, the district averaged the salaries of 14 positions across 13 large school districts, although not every district had an equivalent to every member of the CCSD cabinet.
Based on this, Jara adjusted the pay for 16 of his executives by 5% to 28%. In raw numbers, the increases add up to $408,564, or an average of about $25,000 per cabinet member, “to compete nationally for talent, and retain our existing talent at a time of instability,” Jara said in a Nov. 1 memo to trustees.
The salary adjustments, which begin Dec. 1, also include a 3% bump on top of the salaries given in the memo, in line with the latest contract with the district’s administrators’ union.
The new salaries would go to CCSD’s chief operating officer, chief financial officer, general counsel, chief human resources officer, chief facilities officer, chief communications officer, chief technology officer, deputy superintendent, regional superintendents, and chief college, career and equity officer.
CCSD studied executive pay at similarly sized urban districts in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Denver, plus Miami, Broward County, Hillsborough County, Orange County and Palm Beach, all in Florida.
Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and the Florida districts, along with Clark County, are among the 10 largest by enrollment in the country.
With the executives’ raises, CCSD in general will be competitive with any of its peer markets where it wasn’t before.
Jara attached the comparables to a Nov. 4 memo in which he reminded board members that they’ve been aware of his desire to adjust the pay for the cabinet for more than a year — and ultimately, they went along with the policy amendment that gave him the power to give raises at his own discretion.
“Due to our need to compete and instability being exacerbated by the Board President and supported by the majority of trustees, as the executive officer of the organization, and based on the research staff conducted, I knew it was essential to stabilize the District by retaining and recruiting the best executive team we could assemble to serve the children of Clark County as it continued to be my top priority,” he wrote.
The reference to board President Linda Cavazos, by title, was the closest Jara came to singling anyone out. Cavazos was one of the leading voices on the deeply divided board to call for Jara’s firing. On Nov. 2, the day after Jara penned the memo announcing the raises, Cavazos tweeted that the board was “unexpectedly notified at 10:52am today, via email” of the pay boosts.
“Further review of these raises is possible, but I cannot definitively comment at this time,” she added.
But Jara said he had started talking to the board about potential cabinet raises in October 2020. He discussed it in January, June, July and August in closed-door board meetings and one-on-one discussions, according to his memo and attached notes.
The policy amendment that gave the superintendent the power to grant raises to executives passed 6-0 without discussion at the board’s Aug. 12 meeting, with trustee Katie Williams absent.
“Each of you was aware of this effort, and now one or more trustees chose to release the November 1 memorandum to the media,” Jara said. “This is another example of how difficult it is to operate a school system when a simple clarification or explanation request could have been made.”
The strained relationship between Jara and the board is facing another critical juncture Thursday when the board meets. Trustee Irene Cepeda, who voted for Jara’s termination and was widely viewed as the swing vote on Oct. 28, is seeking reconsideration of Jara’s firing to be added to Thursday’s board agenda. As a procedural matter, the board will have to first separately vote to conduct another vote on rescinding the termination.
As of now, Jara is set to leave the district Dec. 1, more than a year ahead of his contract’s expiration.
If the termination holds up, another item on the agenda will allow the trustees to lay out a process for appointing an interim superintendent. This would be the second take on appointing a temporary leader, as the last trustee meeting on the process on Nov. 4 was derailed after trustees couldn’t agree between an application procedure and promoting a member of Jara’s cabinet.
Also on Thursday’s agenda: A request to investigate Jara’s claims of workplace harassment, which he made in a letter to the district earlier this month.
Through his lawyer, Jara said he would be willing to drop allegations of bullying and a toxic work environment if CCSD paid him $2 million on top of the roughly $657,000 to buy out his contract, which was set to expire in January 2023.
