Trustee Irene Cepeda speaks during a Clark County School Board meeting at the CCSD Greer Education Center Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2022. The board voted, 4-3, to extend Superintendent Jesus Jaras contract by 3.5 years with a $75,000 raise per year.
Sunday, Oct. 9, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Less than a year ago, Clark County Superintendent Jesus Jara was staring down unemployment after a majority of the School Board voted to fire him.
Now, within the past two weeks, the same board has given him a positive review, extended his contract into mid-2026 and given him a $75,000 raise to his base salary.
“We fired him and now you’re telling us that he’s earning a satisfactory rating,” Jessica Alley, a former CCSD teacher, told the Board on Wednesday before its vote. “How does that happen? How does that make sense to anyone on this board? You guys all look like fools.”
So what swung the pendulum in the past year?
The chasm between Jara and some of the board hasn’t closed, as the contract extension and raise offered Wednesday came on a 4-3 vote, the same slim majority that has followed Jara on employment matters throughout his four years in Clark County.
His September evaluation came with a label of “highly effective”; his previous evaluation rated him as “minimally effective to effective.”
Board president Irene Cepeda last October voted in favor of firing Jara, only to change her mind a few weeks later, allowing him to remain at the helm of the nation’s fifth-largest school district.
In a conversation with the Sun, Cepeda said the contract extension was about bringing stability to CCSD. That reasoning is also why she flipped on her decision to fire Jara, she said.
As for the higher evaluation, it’s because the board and Jara agreed to data-based goals — something Cepeda said hadn’t been done for previous evaluations that she said were more subjective.
Cepeda, who has been buffeted by criticism since the termination reversal, said CCSD needs consistent leadership.
“I get this: I ruined my political career,” she said. “I never wanted one to begin with. I do not care about politics, I care about doing the right thing. And I could not sleep at night knowing that we’re going to face a year of upheaval, of chaos in a time where we really needed steady leadership.”
Jara has been a divisive figure in CCSD since the board voted 4-3 to hire him in May 2018 from Florida. Only two of the current members, Lola Brooks and Linda Cavazos, were on the board at the time. Both voted to hire him, on a three-year contract at a salary of $320,000.
In December 2019, after a year and a half at the helm, Jara received his first evaluation with scores ranging from about 2.4-3.4 out of 4. His second evaluation, in December 2020, took a different format, with a single overall score a lukewarm 2.5.
In May 2021, the board — with its current lineup — voted 4-3 to extend Jara’s contract for a year and a half, with the same salary.
Five months later, the firing vote, also on a 4-3 split, came during a raucous, hourslong meeting. By then, Cavazos was one of the voices to terminate, along with Danielle Ford, Lisa Guzman and Cepeda. They fired him “for convenience,” or without a specific reason.
But the board rescinded the termination in November, before it could go into effect, though tension lingered. In between the firing and unfiring votes, Jara filed a hostile work environment claim and demanded $2 million in damages.
When he said in December 2021 that he would stay with CCSD, he didn’t drop the claim and settled with the board in August for $95,000 in attorney’s fees after an unsuccessful arbitration attempt.
Then, on Sept. 29, the board held his annual evaluation publicly, which consultant Deb Darby-Dudley noted was unusual. And at that meeting, a 5-2 majority agreed to a composite score of 3.6 out of 4.
Guzman was among the five to give Jara generally good marks but voted against his extension and raise days later.
Jara set goals for student achievement in reading and math, Black student overrepresentation in discipline, and teacher recruitment.
He achieved his goals in Black student discipline and teacher hiring. He met his reading goals overall and in most, but not all student groups. He did not meet his goals in any category for math — “one of the goals even he knew he did not achieve so I voted against the 4 but he got it anyway,” Guzman noted.
However, consultant Darby-Dudley, who started working with the board this year, said that “we needed to stand as a unit over our individual votes. Therefore, Irene’s mark was correct, so I voted yes. I was following the policy and training.”
Cepeda said she was frustrated last year when, as CCSD was returning to in-person learning, the board spent little time discussing student outcomes. She said that’s improving, although “it’s taken so much of my energy to keep us focused on student outcomes, not the inputs.”
Guzman noted that the board created a calendar for regularly receiving reports from top staff on student outcomes this year, whether academic or social, to keep Jara accountable.
“Last year, we were returning schools, ensuring safety, and trying to address sports, mental health, and COVID,” she said. “That is why we didn’t have academic achievement at the forefront, we were trying to keep our students alive … parents wanting to hurt us because we had students wear masks in the classroom, because we wanted them in classrooms.”
Getting them back in classrooms was last year’s positive outcome, she said.
Going from minimally effective, at worst, to highly effective happened “because the subjective piece was removed,” Cepeda said. “I think that’s the difficult piece when you have seven people evaluating one person.”
“I guess I am of the mindset that if you’re producing results, I feel like someone will always say that they don’t like you,” she added.
That thick internal dissension remains.
Board member Katie Williams, who voted to retain Jara at his new salary of $395,000 a year, excoriated the division Wednesday as damaging and “insane.”
“It’s insane that we can’t just get the stability that we need because we have three members of this board that will fight everything that this entire executive staff does,” she said.
In a way, board member Ford, a consistent critic of the superintendent, agreed.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over expecting a different result,” she replied. “Literally, by definition, this contract is insane.”
