Ray Brewer
Exterior of the Clark County School District main office in Las Vegas, Nevada Thursday, August 31, 2023.
Thursday, Sept. 28, 2023 | 2 a.m.
The Clark County School Board will discuss additional raises for support professionals like classroom aides and bus drivers using money that state lawmakers set aside specifically for school staff salary increases.
The move comes as the district’s contract talks with the teachers union are headed to arbitration.
The School Board will vote today on tentatively allotting about $58 million for staffers represented by the Education Support Employees Association from the $174 million that the state set aside for CCSD through Senate Bill 231, a matching funds program set up by Nevada legislators this spring to give teachers and support professionals raises. In SB 231, lawmakers allocated $250 million statewide.
The raises, in a yet-to-be-determined amount per employee, will be in addition to raises secured through a new contract that CCSD and the Education Support Employees Association settled on in early August.
CCSD has not received its SB 231 money, and these raises would not hit employees’ paychecks immediately after this School Board vote.
The state sent a memo to each of its public school districts on Aug. 2 outlining the steps to getting SB 231 funds.
First, all 17 districts needed to submit staffing reports to the Nevada Department of Education. After that, the Department of Education forwarded those lists to the Interim Finance Committee, a body of state lawmakers that makes various funding decisions between Nevada’s regular biennial legislative sessions, so state fiscal analysts could proportionally divvy up the money.
On Aug. 24, the fiscal analysts sent a follow-up memo to school districts with their calculations showing the maximum each district could receive. CCSD, with about 26,600 eligible employees, will potentially receive the lion’s share of the $250 million pot: up to $173.8 million to split among teachers and support employees, or anyone employed by the district who isn’t an administrator.
With this calculation, districts can now apply to the Interim Finance Committee for their allotments. They will also need to submit budgets or union agreements to prove they are committed to giving additional raises beyond previously agreed-upon adjustments, according to the memo from analysts within the Legislative Counsel Bureau.
The Interim Finance Committee has ultimate say on how much districts will receive, up to the maximum amounts. The committee’s next scheduled meetings are today and Oct. 11. Its agenda for today does not have SB 231-related items, and the agenda for the Oct. 11 meeting is not yet posted.
The bill states that funds must be committed before June 30, 2025. Unspent dollars revert to the state general fund as of Sept. 19, 2025.
The sunset date has been a focal point for CCSD. District officials have consistently argued that the bill limits the funding to the next two years and it would not be prudent to make raises with the funds permanent.
The memorandum of agreement for today’s School Board discussion on the Education Support Employees Association’s wage increases notes that the Interim Finance Committee has not yet determined the date on which the funds will be allocated to CCSD, and that the funds will sunset “unless CCSD receives specific funding from the State of Nevada to continue funding the SB 231 increases into subsequent contract years.”
(Other districts that have recently settled employee contracts have put in SB 231 placeholder provisions referencing the sunset date.)
The School Board will also similarly consider setting aside $1 million in SB 231 money to give raises to officers in the CCSD Police Department. The district police officers are represented by a different union but are considered eligible support employees under SB 231.
The district has not reached this stage in discussing SB 231 raises for teachers. CCSD declared impasse earlier this month in its bitterly drawn-out negotiations with the Clark County Education Association, the teachers union, to secure a new two-year contract, sending the contract matter to arbitration after 11 negotiation sessions failed to produce an agreement.
The School Board meeting begins at 5 p.m. at the Greer Education Center, 2832 E. Flamingo Road in Las Vegas.
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