Second graders Angelica Farris, left, and Cazper Redic work on a project with teacher Samantha Allen during a summer acceleration class at McMillan Elementary School Friday, June 4, 2023.
Tuesday, July 18, 2023 | 5:42 p.m.
The Clark County School District is proposing to reset teachers on a new pay scale, leading to potentially significant raises for the majority of teachers and better reflecting the years of experience and education of seasoned educators.
The “look back” proposal that CCSD announced Tuesday comes a year after the district increased its minimum teacher salary to $50,115, putting many experienced teachers who came from other districts in or near the same pay bracket as entry-level hires. Under the plan, raises could range from about 1% to 70%, said Carol Tolx, the district’s director of human resources.
Raises are contingent on reaching a contract agreement with the Clark County Education Association (CCEA) teachers union and would be covered by the $2 billion-plus infusion of funding dedicated to public education in the most recent legislative session. CCEA had proposed raises of 18% across the board.
“We’re establishing a philosophy of compensation. In the philosophy of compensation, there are two pillars,” Tolx said. “One is years of experience and (the other is) level of education. So if we agree that that’s how we’re going to value and compensate our employees, then when we do look back, 78% of the people that are on our current salary schedule would receive an increase based on their level of experience and their level of education.”
The total cost of the proposed raises is not yet clear. Each employee would be considered individually, officials said.
The announcement comes one week after CCSD said it was adjusting the start and end times at 47 schools with extended days for the coming academic year, which the district attributed to the union’s refusal to consider the contract waivers needed for its teachers to work hours other than the standard day.
In a memo Tuesday to teachers, Superintendent Jesus Jara said the latest state appropriation was a “historic investment in education.”
“We want to use this funding to focus on compensating you for your years of experience and education,” he wrote. “The Board of Trustees and I intend to dedicate the increased Pupil Centered Funding Plan dollars allocated from the state to compensate you and all our employees. However, the CCEA’s requests far exceed the dollars provided by the Pupil Centered Funding Plan and would require the district to use one-time funds to pay for recurring expenses. It would be irresponsible for the district to use one-time funds — (pandemic relief), school carry-over, ending fund balances, and SB 231 monies — for ongoing compensation purposes, even if the district could legally do so, which is uncertain.”
Senate Bill 231 sets aside $250 million in matching funds to encourage school districts around Nevada to offer raises to teachers and support staff. The bill passed with overwhelming support during the legislative session and was signed into law by Gov. Joe Lombardo. It is separate from the additional $2 billion earmarked for per pupil funding.
Jara added that flat, across-the-board salary increases “would only perpetuate the inequitable current salary schedule, ignoring retention challenges.”
CCEA did not immediately return a request for comment or publicly post a statement Tuesday. However, last week it said that CCSD “refuses to pay salary increases to educators on the scale that we deserve.”
Tolx said pay for licensed employees — teachers along with other professionals like nurses, counselors and psychologists — was one of the first issues to come up when she started at CCSD a little more than a year ago.
“I think that came up pretty quickly because we had raised the bottom from (about $42,000 annually) to $50,115 — which was, I think, a really smart way to compete with our contiguous counties and also across the nation,” she said. “But one of the things that I did find out is that the way that we compensate our licensed employees is not transparent.”
Despite the current pay scale, with $50,115 as the floor, teachers who come from other districts with some experience are first placed on an 8-year-old scale with a $34,000 base to determine their salary, then brought up to the $50,115 mark if they wouldn’t earn that or better. This concentrated journeyman teachers at the entry-level salary, she said.
“When we would make offers, it wasn’t adding up to me why they always seem to fall into the $50,115, even regardless of their level of education and their years of experience,” Tolx said.
At least 150 would-be out-of-state transfers changed their minds this summer after learning what their CCSD pay would be, she said.
She explained that there were about 80 “cells” in CCSD’s teacher salary scale. Her department took a deeper look at the entry-level cell and found that 4,272 out of about 18,500 teachers in CCSD were at that step, even those with more experience than freshly trained teachers.
Her team then further examined those lowest-paid teachers’ qualifications, finding “it ranged from people having zero years of experience with a bachelor’s degree to people who had 17 years of experience to people who had a Ph.D. So I knew right at that point that I had some inequity in the compensation scale, and then the frustration made a lot more sense,” she said.
After human resources performed the same study of all teachers, the department created the proposed new scale that would consider up to 15 years of experience, and education up to the doctoral level.
The proposed scale, which the district declined to share because, it said, it has not been approved amid the ongoing labor negotiations, would leave in place the current advancement system, which is based on internal professional development courses.
Tolx said a hypothetical teacher with 11 years of experience and a master’s degree but still only making about $50,000 — because that teacher was hired under the old scale — could translate those qualifications to a salary of about $75,000, if the union accepted CCSD’s proposal.
The 22% of teachers who would not be getting raises are either “properly” placed — one who is already paid correctly once the look back proposal would come into play — or are upper-end outliers from when CCSD gave salary matching for transfers. The salary matches put some teachers — even relatively inexperienced ones — from the highest cost-of-living states far outside the local scale. Tolx said those teachers will be held harmless under CCSD’s proposal.
The school year starts Aug. 7. If a new contract is not in place by then, the existing contract would remain in effect.
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