Union’s deception a disservice to teachers, students and parents

Sunday, Sept. 17, 2023 | 2 a.m.

Clark County taxpayers have every right to be upset. With rolling sick-outs canceling classes at the last minute, leaving parents in a bind and students without instruction, taxpayers should at least expect that teachers are justified in their disruptive actions.

But as groundbreaking reporting from the Sun’s Hillary Davis revealed last week, the illegal strikes by Clark County Education Association (CCEA) members are largely unjustified because the Clark County School District’s offer is significantly richer than what the CCEA has demanded.

In other words, CCEA executive director John Vellardita and the rest of the union’s irresponsible leadership have duped teachers into strike action sickouts in order to get less than CCSD is offering. It also means the teachers who called in sick, closed schools, denied students their education and hammered working-class parents who had to skip work themselves because of the school closures did it all for an imaginary crisis cooked up by the CCEA.

Teachers are busy people and teaching isn’t easy in the best of circumstances. Thus, it isn’t surprising that teachers relied on the leadership and their union representatives to advise them on whether CCSD was making a fair offer. But as the Sun’s analysis of CCSD’s contract offer shows, CCEA leadership either lied to union members, were too incompetent to do the math or willfully broke the bond between the teachers and the community for their own amusement. Those are the only apparent options, as math itself does not lie.

The contract proposed by School District is $40 million more generous than the one the district says the union is advocating for, according to a Sun analysis of both packages.

The difference largely comes down to how money allocated by Senate Bill 231 is used.

SB 231 provides matching funds for districts to give raises to teachers and staff. According to a memo from the state Legislative Counsel Bureau, which the Sun received through a public records request, CCSD should receive approximately $173.8 million in SB 231 funds.

CCSD has offered to dedicate two-thirds of the SB 231 funds, or approximately $114.7 million, to teachers, with the other one-third going to paraprofessional, administrative and other essential support staff. However, the language of the bill specifically sunsets the funding in June 2025.

CCEA leadership is demanding that the raises funded by SB 231 remain permanent, regardless of funding allocated by the state, while CCSD has offered to provide the raises that SB 231 envisions but with a sunset date noted. CCSD has also offered additional compensation for teachers to be included in the two-year contract, totaling $748.7 million dollars — $40.7 million more than CCEA is seeking, at least over the two-year life of the contract, which conveniently nearly matches the dates of the SB 231 additional funding.

Put another way, CCSD is offering each of the district’s 18,000 teachers an average of $2,000 per year above CCEA’s demands, yet the union continues to refuse the offer and its members are now engaging in sickout-style strikes that are illegal, harmful to kids and frustrating for parents.

Last week, a Nevada District Court judge issued a preliminary injunction against the union and prohibited CCEA and its members from continuing strike actions or face significant legal consequences.

Adding to the appearance of bad faith and manipulation by CCEA leaders, the union appealed the decision by arguing that the injunction is confusing and “does not describe in reasonable detail the act or acts restrained or required.”

It’s an asinine argument given that the judge’s order specifically refers to Nevada Revised Statute 288.074, which defines a “strike” as:

1. Stoppage of work, slowdown or interruption of operations by employees of the State of Nevada or local government employees;

2. Absence from work by employees of the State of Nevada or local government employees upon any pretext or excuse, such as illness, which is not founded in fact; or

3. Interruption of the operations of the State of Nevada or any local government employer by any employee organization or labor organization.

There is nothing “confusing” about those definitions.

CCEA goes on to assert that the district hasn’t provided any evidence that the teachers in question weren’t actually sick. But for CCEA’s argument to hold water, we would have to believe that on seven different days, at eight different schools, as many as 87% of teachers suddenly became too sick to work, but miraculously recovered enough to return for the next day of instruction.

Just as importantly, we would have to ignore, as first reported by the Sun, a slide presented by CCEA leadership at a closed-door meeting with teachers and subsequently leaked by an apparently appalled teacher, that specifically described rolling sickouts targeting individual schools. This slide was presented in court last week, though the judge refused to admit it into evidence as the person who leaked it did not come forward, presumably out of fears of reprisals by the union.

On Friday a three-judge panel of the Nevada Supreme Court rejected CCEA’s motion for a stay in the case. It’s simple to understand why: The CCEA’s denials of its involvement in the sickouts are bald-faced lies offered in bad faith by a union leadership that is a disgrace to the teachers they represent.

Teachers should be ashamed to even be associated with this type of manipulative and dishonest rhetoric. Instead of sharing the hard facts about teacher compensation and the real-life struggles of overworked, underpaid and underappreciated teachers in the midst of one of the most challenging periods in American educational history, the union is instead echoing the illogical reasoning of so-called flat-Earthers, bullies and mob bosses.

Whether intentional or not, teachers are demonstrating to students that blindly following leaders who disregard logic, facts and math is fine, as long as those leaders claim to fight for your side.

Most teachers wouldn’t accept such failures from their students; they shouldn’t accept them from their union leaders.

There is a fair deal on the table that exceeds the union’s demands by tens of millions of dollars, at least for the next two-year contract period. Teachers should take the deal before the actions they’ve been tricked into turn the tide of public opinion. Then they should ask hard questions of their union leadership, whose deception and manipulation do a disservice to members of one of the hardest-working and most important professions in our country.