Attorneys Bradley Schrager, center, representing the Clark County Educational Association (CCEA), and Ethan Thomas, representing the Clark County School District, make arguments during a hearing at the Regional Justice Center in downtown Las Vegas Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023. John Vellardita, executive director of the CCEA, is seated to the left of Schrager.
Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2023 | 2 a.m.
CCSD-CCEA contract roadblock
A Clark County District Court judge will determine today if the lawsuit filed in late July by the Clark County School District to prevent its teachers union from work stoppage violates protection on free speech.
The hearing will center around the Clark County Education Association’s claims that the district’s lawsuit violated Nevada’s anti-SLAPP law — “Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.”
Anti-SLAPP motions, the union argued, “protect the exercise of fundamental speech rights against meritless and retaliatory suits like the one in question.”
The anti-SLAPP motion was filed before a Clark County District Court judge who heard and rejected CCSD’s first request on Aug. 22 for a strike injunction on the reasoning that she didn’t have enough information to do so. But neither that initial denial nor another judge later granting that injunction dismissed the case outright — meaning the anti-SLAPP motion is still alive.
With an injunction now in hand concluding that a strike had recently commenced and needed to be stopped, CCSD lawyers say it’s now all the more apparent that no speech was chilled and that the strike had happened as telegraphed.
The School District said in a Monday filing that Judge Crystal Eller’s Sept. 13 injunction plus two photos of a slide suggested to be leaked from a union meeting held over the summer, bearing the words “rolling school outs” and “selective sick outs,” bolster the argument that the entire case should not be thrown out to protect the union’s First Amendment rights.
Allowing CCEA to use the anti-SLAPP law “to punish or dissuade a public employer’s exercise of its rights” under state statutes allowing governments to take legal action to stop or prevent a strike is inconsistent with the law, the School District argued.
Furthermore, CCSD said, this isn’t a frivolous “SLAPP suit.”
“This is a meritorious action whose primary purpose was to prevent an unlawful strike from commencing and continuing. Further, the court has already found that an illegal strike has commenced and enjoined the defendants from continuing the same,” School District lawyers wrote. “For these reasons, defendants cannot meet their burden to show that the action is primarily based upon their good-faith communications.”
CCSD sued CCEA in district court July 31 to block a strike, citing comments made by union leaders and members that “work actions” were possible if the union did not have a new contract by Aug. 26. (It did not and still does not have a new contract, as CCSD declared an impasse in negotiations Sept. 5 after 11 bargaining sessions, sending the contract matter to arbitration.) CCSD interpreted statements about “work actions” made in news and social media as a threat to strike to get the district to acquiesce to the union’s contract demands that include, among other provisions, 18% across-the-board raises.
State law bars strikes, and threats of strikes, by public employees, and the law defines “strike” broadly. That includes sickouts.
In its first anti-SLAPP filing on Aug. 21, CCEA argued that CCSD’s lawsuit was politically driven and that “no one could have believed a teachers’ strike was imminent on July 31 … or that one is imminent now.”
On Sept. 1, a single school, Southeast Career and Technical Academy, was hit by such high teacher absences that classes had to be combined and many students were held in common areas like the gym for supervision. More mass teacher callouts, at one to four schools at a time, followed almost daily until Sept. 13, the day Eller issued the injunction; a district investigation showed that a significant number of those teachers coded their absences as being for illness. By the day of the injunction, 10 schools had either been canceled or saw combined classes for a day at a time.
Eller said it was “preposterous” to believe that the absence spikes were coincidentally driven by true illness. (Five additional schools had to combine classes because of high teacher callouts Friday, although Monday’s filing did not mention these.)
CCEA filed an appeal Thursday in the Nevada Supreme Court to overturn the injunction. Although the appeal has not yet been decided, a three-judge panel on Friday denied the union’s motion to delay the injunction while the appeal is pending.
The anti-SLAPP hearing begins at 10 a.m. in the courtroom of District Court Judge Jessica Peterson, who denied the injunction Aug. 22.
