An exterior view of the Clark County School District administrative offices Tuesday, March 29, 2022.
Published Wednesday, July 12, 2023 | 12:58 p.m.
Updated Wednesday, July 12, 2023 | 5:14 p.m.
Several dozen Clark County School District schools will start the coming school year on adjusted daily schedules after the district and the largest local teachers’ union remained mired in contract negotiations, the district announced today.
CCSD said it is adjusting the start and end times at 47 schools that had extended days because of the impasse, which the district attributed to the Clark County Education Association’s refusal to consider the contract waivers needed for its teachers to work hours other than the standard day.
The school year starts on Aug. 7, less than four weeks away.
“Our students will bear the brunt of CCEA’s unreasonable demands, and learning loss will occur with reduced classroom time,” district spokesman Tod Story said in a statement. “Should CCEA continue its bad faith, obstructionist tactics of refusing contract waivers, our licensed professionals at these schools will see a reduction in their work hours, which estimates show results in over $10 million less in pay. Our teachers and especially our students deserve better.”
The last teacher contract defined standard teacher work days as 7 hours, 11 minutes long, exactly one hour longer than the typical student day. A program in place for the past several years allows individual schools to seek district and union approval to run days that are, on average, about 20 minutes longer for additional instruction. Staff at these schools are compensated for this added time.
In an interview, Story said the scheduling adjustments would vary by school, including whether the day would start later or dismiss earlier, how much time during the day would be cut and what teachers previously did with that extra time. He said the adjustments would also need to include rescheduling buses.
Story said the district has been trying to get the contract waivers secured for the past six months. District administration has the authority to make this decision without a School Board vote, he said.
The district did not detail which union demands it would not allow, but in a June 16 all-staff email updating employees on ongoing union negotiations, CCSD said CCEA wanted to “completely restructure the pay schedule” and give 78% of teachers a raise, although it didn’t say how much.
CCEA said in a statement that CCSD “refuses to pay salary increases to educators on the scale that we deserve.”
“It is the height of hypocrisy for CCSD to demand that educators extend their school day without adjusting their pay with a salary increase, especially when the money is there. Legislators and the Governor allocated money precisely for that purpose,” the union said. “Educators are not going back to work on the same pay scale while CCSD receives hundreds of millions of additional dollars.”
Although state lawmakers did not directly give educators raises in the session that ended last month, they did, on a near-unanimous vote, pass Senate Bill 231 to create a statewide $250 million pot of matching funds to encourage school districts to give raises to teachers and school support staff. Gov. Joe Lombardo also followed through on his State of the State announcement to increase Nevada’s per-pupil funding by more than 25%, or about $2 billion over the next two years.
The district provided a timeline outlining that its negotiations with CCEA in recent years yielded annual raises in the 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years. In each of those years, teachers received 3% salary increases and a one-rung advancement on the salary ladder, the district said.
CCSD last gave across-the-board teacher pay raises in 2021. Last year, the district brought up annual base pay for new teachers from about $43,000 to $50,115 but did not adjust salaries for more senior teachers at that time. (It has tapped into federal pandemic relief funds to offer each teacher $7,000 in retention bonuses over the last two years.)
CCEA and Superintendent Jesus Jara have publicly been at odds for several months. The union wants Jara, who secured a $75,000 raise and contract extension from the School Board last fall that keeps him at CCSD’s helm through June 2026, to resign or be fired. It cites poor student achievement in Jara’s five years in Clark County and says 75% of its members have no confidence in Jara’s ability to effectively spend an influx of funding to improve student outcomes.
“The money is there” for teacher raises, the union said. “The priority isn’t according to Jara and his four trustees.”
The district did not immediately release a list of schools affected by the schedule shift, but did say they affected students “in some of the most underserved communities” and said principals would be in contact with families.
“Please know that the district has made exhaustive attempts to work with the CCEA to implement the process for approval of the contract waivers,” Deputy Superintendent Brenda Larsen-Mitchell said in a staffwide memo. “However, these attempts over the last six months have not yielded a successful outcome as the CCEA would not agree to these waivers without additional, unreasonable concessions by the district in the upcoming 2023-2025 Negotiated Agreement.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
