Clark County School District Superintendent Jesus Jara speaks during the 2023 State of the Schools address at Resorts World Las Vegas, Friday, Jan. 27, 2023.
Saturday, April 22, 2023 | 2 a.m.
Jara as superintendent
The largest teachers union in the Clark County School District has issued a vote of no confidence in Superintendent Jesus Jara’s ability to effectively spend the proposed influx of state funding for public schools.
“We are now going on five years under Jara’s tenure as superintendent. From the very beginning, he’s told the community to judge him not by his rhetoric, but by his record — and that record couldn’t be more clear,” the Clark County Education Association said in a Friday statement. “Graduation rates are suspect, proficiency levels continue to be chronically low, the disparities between our most at-risk students and everyone else continue to widen, and our students are fundamentally not college or career ready upon leaving CCSD.”
The union said it surveyed “several thousand educators” and that three-quarters of them have no confidence in Jara’s ability to spend the added $400 million that CCSD is projected to receive next year alone if Gov. Joe Lombardo’s ambitious budget goes through.
Jara has been an embattled leader since taking CCSD’s helm in 2018, but a no-confidence vote will not directly threaten his job. This is the second time in four years that a CCSD employee union has said it has no confidence in his leadership.
In 2019, the administrators union similarly panned Jara after he eliminated the dean of students position at middle- and high schools in the face of budget cuts. Principals in the Clark County Association of School Administrators and Professional-Technical Employees said they were not consulted before Jara announced the dean cuts via video message.
The School Board, which oversees Jara, has renewed his contract twice since then — most recently in October, when a divided board gave him a three-year extension and $75,000-a-year raise, a year after firing him “for convenience” and then reversing the termination.
‘Questionable nature’
The union says the school district should be given one year to show that it is using its funding on programs proven to make achievement gains.
CCEA Executive Director John Vellardita said Friday that he thinks parents want to know how the district will improve their children’s education with the same sense of urgency, and he said there is a broad lack of trust in CCSD, citing an ultimately unsuccessful citizen-led initiative last year to force lawmakers to consider a school district breakup. So the union plans a community outreach campaign next.
“As front-line educators, we know first-hand what’s going on in these classrooms and we’re going to take that message to the community,” Vellardita said. “We’re going to target particularly voters that have children in the school district, and we’re going to share with them that our educators have lost confidence that this superintendent and this leadership is going to use the funds that they’re going to receive — the additional funds — in a way that’s going to improve student outcomes.”
The district responded to CCEA’s announcement with skepticism.
“With the questionable nature of this purported survey, this is an attempt by CCEA — who barely represent half of the teachers in CCSD — to influence contract negotiations in a bad faith attempt to leverage what little credibility they have left with teachers,” the district said in a statement. “It is unfortunate that their focus is not on improving the salary schedule and health expectations to retain our hard-working educators. They deserve better from their bargaining association.”
Vellardita said the union plans to release the details of its survey, including exactly how many people participated, at a later date.
The union’s assessment comes a few weeks after lawmakers grilled Jara and other district leaders at a hearing in Carson City.
The Assembly Ways & Means and Senate Finance committees met jointly in March with all 17 of Nevada’s school districts to discuss student achievement and plans for the additional $2 billion total that Lombardo announced during his January State of the State address that he wants to spread around the state over the next two years.
Lawmakers on March 31 asked Jara, School Board President Evelyn Garcia Morales, Chief Financial Officer Jason Goudie, and other top-level administrators about how CCSD will improve academic achievement, how it has used its federal pandemic relief funds, how much it has spent on improving campus security, and how it has reallocated federal funds for high-poverty schools.
In one exchange, Assemblywoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno, D-North Las Vegas, said CCSD was failing her children and she asked Jara why there had not been a call to action long ago. Last year, for example, only 21.8% of middle-schoolers were proficient in math and 40.8% of elementary schoolers were proficient in reading, with Black and Latino children faring significantly worse, according to district data.
Monroe-Moreno cut Jara off as he was saying that CCSD had an adult-focused culture when he came on board and directed him “to just answer the question.”
