Nevada Lt. Gov. Lisa Cano Burkhead works with students in a Spanish class at Chaparral High School Thursday, April 6, 2022.
Friday, April 8, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Nevada Lt. Gov. Lisa Cano Burkhead went back to her professional and childhood roots Thursday as a substitute teacher in the Las Vegas high school she credits with setting her on her path to one of the highest positions in Nevada government.
Cano Burkhead, a Las Vegas native and educator by trade who maintains a teaching license, was a substitute teacher for Spanish classes at Chaparral High School, where she graduated in 1989.
She gathered feedback from her young constituents, helped them conjugate verbs, and pitched in as the Clark County School District continues to grapple with a shortage of permanent and substitute teachers.
Cano Burkhead in February filled in a social studies classroom at Sparks High School in Northern Nevada, and she plans to continue subbing throughout her term. Teens are her constituents too, and she wants to know their challenges.
She said the teacher shortage was one of the first topics to come up in conversation with her Chaparral students before the day’s lesson. Cano Burkhead, a Democrat, was appointed to the position by Gov. Steve Sisolak in December, some five months after retiring as a CCSD principal.
“They need teachers in the classroom,” she said during a break between morning classes. “If I can help even just for a moment, I think that’s a good thing to do.”
As of this morning, CCSD had just under 1,400 teaching job listings, mostly for next school year but also several for teachers who could start this term. Staffing has been so strained that the district took a five-day weekend during a coronavirus peak in January because of a lack of available, healthy teachers.
Cano Burkhead retired from CCSD last summer after 25 years as a teacher and administrator. She started as a high school English and Spanish teacher and was most recently the principal at Foothill High School in Henderson.
Long before that, she was on the student council at Chaparral.
“Walking up the stairs to my alma mater, to what I called home during my high school career, as lieutenant governor, really, I need to credit all the teachers and administrators that I had in high school who really pushed me and believed in my ability to lead,” she said.
In her role as lieutenant governor, she works on economic development — and it’s not so far from her original career, she said.
“I’ve always said that education is economic development,” Cano Burkhead said.
“We need to make sure that our kids have the skill set necessary to prepare them to go into the workforce, and that we are working collectively as a community to prepare them and to work with our business community, and taking a look in the future of what those jobs are going to be and what that skill set is, so that we can prepare them for success.”
