‘We need teachers’: Rural Nevada schools struggle to attract help. Students pay the price.

By Hillary Davis (contact)

Sunday, Feb. 5, 2023 | 2 a.m.

TONOPAH — The assignment in the junior-level Tonopah High School English class was a patriotic poem. After drafting their American ideals, the students stood at the head of the classroom and recited their verses.

“America: strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,” read Savanna Muns, before her classmates and teacher. “America: homeland of the free.”

Except her teacher, though encouraging, wasn’t actually in the room. She was on a large monitor, beamed in via video conference, because the rural school’s staff is so depleted that administrators have no choice but to contract with private companies that provide teachers virtually.

Tonopah High School enrolls 118 students, enough for at least nine in-person teachers. It has three.

Nye County School Superintendent Warren Shillingburg oversees the schools in Tonopah and the other small towns that dot the sprawling county. He said that without a significant infusion of state cash — to recruit and retain teachers with pay closer to what they’d find in the big cities, to hire specialists to remediate pupils in the basics, to fuel more electives to keep students engaged — the situation won’t improve.

Academically, neither will his students. Most don’t meet standards on state exams. Some adolescents struggle to even read, he said.

“We need reading specialists. We need math interventionists. We need teaching coaches,” Shillingburg said.

He took a beat just long enough to emphasize a simple, yet all-encompassing point: “We need teachers.”

‘Expecting us to do the impossible’

Tonopah High isn’t the only one of Nye County’s roughly two dozen schools with job openings. But it is in the most dire straits, Shillingburg said.

For months, Principal Melinda Jeffrey has been unable to convince a single English teacher — or science, math, basic computer science, languages or special education teacher — to move to Tonopah, a town of about 2,000 people at least three hours from the nearest metro area.

“We got zero applicants” over the summer, she said. “The teacher shortage is real.”

In July, she sent out a letter notifying families of the virtual teacher stopgap. She explained it as “the next best thing we as a district could do to ensure that we keep the doors open at Tonopah High School.”

Nye is the largest county landwise in Nevada and the third-largest in the United States at more than 18,000 square miles, but is home to little more than 50,000 people. Outside of Pahrump, the county’s population center, the schools are widely scattered.

When national conversations on teacher shortages mention Nevada, they’re essentially referring to the Las Vegas metro and Clark County School District. CCSD, being the fifth-largest district in the country, will skew state numbers Las Vegas-centric. But rural Nevada is not spared.

Most of Nevada is rural — frontier, even.

The drive to Tonopah from Las Vegas takes three and a half hours, following the ribbon of the U.S. 95 freeway that unspools out of Las Vegas and north into the high desert, past the yuccas and the white salt-crusted soil into the heart of Nevada’s mining country, where Tonopah was once a silver and gold boomtown.

Lithium is the most attractive mineral there today. The precious metals bonanza is a century past, but wild burros, feral descendants of pack animals that escaped from prospectors or were abandoned when they were no longer needed, are still common enough that road signs of a donkey in silhouette remind drivers to be alert.

While the landscape is placid and picturesque, the youngest residents have less to work with. According to the Nevada Department of Education, 99.6% of Nye County students qualify for free or reduced lunch, a marker for low family incomes. Notably fewer students are proficient in math and reading when compared to the state average.

Yet Shillingburg, a 40-year educator who is in his third year at Nye’s helm, said the state had offered no extra resources to lift up the district’s students.

In his State of the State address last month, Gov. Joe Lombardo proposed spending $2 billion more on public K-12 education over the next two years, or more than $2,000 more per pupil, per year. He alluded to the funding being contingent on results in the future: “I won’t accept a lack of funding as an excuse for underperformance,” he said.

The Assembly and the Senate would need to approve the budget package first. As of now, it’s not clear how the money would break out at the district level.

Shillingburg said he knew how to increase student achievement in his previous districts over the decades — middle class and wealthy suburbs in Arizona and Illinois.

“I don’t know how to do it by myself” in working-class rural Nevada, he said. “If I don’t have the resources, it’s ridiculous to expect us to do the impossible.”

Last year, Nye County School District averaged a ranking of 14th out of Nevada’s 17 county school districts on state math and reading exam scores. Because of Nye’s consistently low performance, ­the state requires the district to file annual continuous improvement plans for every school. Shillingburg bristles at this assignment, which requires hundreds of pages of paperwork, as missing the point.

“A plan isn’t going to do any good if I haven’t got the staff to carry it out,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m spending so much energy to write a plan for improvement if there’s nobody to do it.”

Holding on

In Esmeralda County, a grow-your-own strategy appears to be working — a blessing, as Superintendent James Fossett knows how challenging it can be to attract external candidates.

“Some teachers who have interviewed on the phone simply drive straight through town and quit before they even start,” he said in an email.

Esmeralda County has the smallest school district in Nevada, with fewer than 100 students of all ages and 10 teachers across three campuses. Two support staffers, who already know the local pace of life, are pursuing their full certifications and teaching in the meantime with substitute licenses.

While the enrollment allows individualized instruction, teachers work in multiage classrooms in remote villages. The shortest route to Las Vegas from Dyer Elementary, the county’s largest school with 40 students, requires an hour’s drive on a two-lane mountain road just to hit the U.S. 95, then another two and a half hours southeast along the highway — and that’s on a clear day.

“Those coming from outside quite often don’t last more than a year or two and culturally have a negative challenge when trying to work in our very unique rural environment,” Fossett said. “Just try to go from teaching 25 or 30 first- or fifth-graders in city schools, to teaching 12 students at three grade levels, plus special education students and (English learner) students. Honestly, it’s as challenging as it sounds.”

He acknowledges how the challenges of rural living can outweigh the lower cost of real estate. He said he’s lost several good teachers in the recent past after they wanted to grow their families and realized just how far away they were from a hospital with a maternity ward.

When Clark County School District upped its starting pay last year to about $50,000, that made it even harder for districts like Esmeralda, where first-year teachers start around $43,000. Fossett said CCSD Superintendent Jesus Jara had the right idea and didn’t fault him for making the “bold” move to pay teachers more.

And Jara is sympathetic to the rural conditions, because they are, ultimately, familiar. When he appeared at the December State Board of Education meeting, to present on improving student and educator success statewide in his capacity as the president of the Nevada Association of School Superintendents, Jara turned the microphone over to his counterpart from remote White Pine County.

“It’s very clear what we face in Clark, my colleagues across the state are facing the same issues,” Jara said.

Student self-awareness

Fossett was at Nye schools, and in small-town Wyoming before that, before moving to Esmeralda. He understands rural life and plans to eventually retire here. He speaks fondly of the Mozart Tavern in Goldfield — Esmeralda’s county seat with a population of about 200 – collecting Christmas gifts for the local children.

Tonopah is close-knit too. At the high school, when the secretary summons students from class to set up for a pep rally, she calls out only first names through the intercom. In the main corridor, composite photos of senior portraits through the years line the walls. Principal Jeffrey is in one of them. Her parents are in others.

But even as a lifelong Tonopah resident, Jeffrey said living there can be difficult. Teachers leave Tonopah for the same reasons they leave any other school or district: They’re changing careers. Their spouse gets a job out of town. Or they split because small-town living isn’t for them, especially for the $42,000 salary Nye schools pays starting teachers.

Shillingburg said students here were aware of what they don’t have. The compulsory improvement plans summarize family surveys, which show students want electives like agriculture and band.

“They don’t understand why they aren’t getting the class opportunities other kids get,” he said.

After reading her poem in English class, Savanna was obviously pleased. She said she worked hard on this assignment, and she likes the teachers that she hasn’t met in person. But she admitted it can be hard to digest the virtual format.

The boy next to her, Luka Terry, agreed.

“I’m doing better than I’ve done in English before, but it isn’t the best I’ve done,” he said.

In classes assigned a virtual teacher, a paid, adult aide supervises the group and runs the technology. That’s what Tianna Novak does in the math classroom.

She makes it clear that she’s not a “real teacher” or even strong at math, but she tries to do the problems alongside the students because she’s all they have for in-person help.

Novak said the high school offers nothing lower than first-year algebra, but many students need fundamental arithmetic review courses instead. What they get is too-advanced math through a swift-moving online platform without a certified math teacher physically in the room to give hands-on assistance, she said.

Novak said that only two or three kids in each class grasp the material and the rest cheat “for survival. They’re so far behind they can’t catch up.” But they won’t drop out. They want their diplomas.

She wonders what could happen if another teacher leaves.

“If they lose one more, is that even sustainable?”