John Vellardita, executive director of the Clark County Education Association union, attends a news conference at CCSD headquarters Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2019.
Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2024 | 2 a.m.
The head of the teachers union in the Clark County School District said he didn’t support a revised pay scale that would have better recognized veteran teachers’ education and experience because those teachers were likely to be white and in the suburbs.
Now, veteran teachers in the district — white and minorities, teaching in urban and suburban CCSD schools — are paying the price as the district institutes a two-tiered pay scale that compensates new hires at higher rates of pay than teachers already in the district.
John Vellardita, executive director of the Clark County Education Association, testified in a state labor board hearing last fall that he made the remark during a contract negotiation session with CCSD.
“I did say that,” he told a CCSD lawyer at the Nov. 7 hearing of the Nevada Government Employee-Management Relations Board. “And I said it in context, and I was consistent that the district’s proposal was benefiting the teachers in the suburban core.”
The benefit, he said, would be disproportionate, although it’s not clear how Vellardita determined who would reap the most from being realigned on a new pay scale. He said during the hearing that CCEA did its own demographics research, but he did not provide details.
The Nevada Government Employee-Management Relations Board, or EMRB, is a quasi-judicial public agency that resolves disputes between local governments and their unions.
CCEA and CCSD are no strangers to disputes — in 2023 alone, CCEA filed seven claims against CCSD; CCSD filed three against CCEA, records show.
Most of the complaints came while the district and union were battling during contract negotiations.
Vellardita’s comment on race formed part of the basis of a complaint the district filed against the union alleging prohibited labor practices. It is against state law for both employers and unions to discriminate based on race.
An arbitrator ultimately accepted a contract agreement between the union and the district in December, separately of any labor board complaints. While it includes 18% across-the-board raises between this year and next, the contract does not reset currently employed teachers on a pay scale based on advanced education and years of experience.
Such a reform, which CCSD and CCEA call a “lookback,” had been touted by both parties. It would have addressed salary compaction, a phenomenon fueled by off-and-on pay freezes and shifting pay structures over the years, that made for only small pay gaps between newer and many senior teachers.
When confronted at the EMRB hearing, though, Vellardita said it would have increased disparity.
However, education and experience are the basis for a mutually agreed-upon pay scale for teachers hired in CCSD from here out. This means new hires will walk on at annual wages that may be tens of thousands of dollars more than teachers who have been in CCSD for years, even if the established local teachers have comparable education and experience — leaving veterans feeling undervalued and betrayed.
David Waterhouse first joined CCSD in 2006 after teaching for six years in Texas. He is white, and one of the experienced, master’s degree-holding teachers of any race who could have benefited significantly from being realigned on a new pay scale.
“These are obviously blatant, racist and hurtful comments,” he said.
Waterhouse, who took time away from teaching to serve in the military during the war in Afghanistan, currently assists students with credit retrieval at Sunrise Mountain High School.
Situated in a densely populated pocket of the northeast valley, Sunrise Mountain is not in affluent suburbia. Census data show that the per-capita income in the immediate surroundings is less than $25,000 annually.
Waterhouse said he enjoyed his work and his students, and he speaks well of his school’s administration. But he is disappointed with his union.
“I myself am a member of CCEA and I keep hoping for better,” he said. “With friends like this, who needs enemies?”
Vellardita did not return a message from the Sun for comment on behalf of CCEA members.
‘CCEA discriminated against its own’
The Sun streamed hours of EMRB hearings and reviewed hundreds of pages of filings and transcripts in cases involving CCEA and CCSD from the last year. Most of the cases the union brought were dismissed or dropped, records show.
Those include a complaint about employment terms and conditions in the district’s Transformation Network, which was formed to improve reading proficiency in some of the district’s lowest-achieving schools; a complaint that the district’s labor negotiator left a meeting when the union would not consent to audio recording the discussion; claims that CCSD was unfairly limiting use of teachers’ district email for union communications, that unnamed administrators had disparaged the union, and that district-issued public updates amounted to “direct dealing” that undermined collective bargaining.
A panel of EMRB board members issued an order last month rejecting CCEA’s arguments that the highly publicized partnership that CCSD’s support staff union has had with Teamsters Local 14 for four years led to the creation of another, de facto union that CCEA had a right to challenge.
For its part, CCSD filed a complaint seeking to decertify CCEA’s status as the official labor union for all 18,000 district teachers, citing a broken pledge in their contract to not strike. The filing followed up on a Clark County District Court injunction to stop an illegal rolling strike that occurred when teacher sick calls last fall led to eight school closures, each lasting one day, throughout the valley.
The decertification proceedings are on hold while CCEA appeals the injunction, a case that is pending before the Nevada Supreme Court.
The district also filed a counter complaint against CCEA’s claim of direct dealing. It was this complaint that revealed Vellardita’s remark about the white teachers in the suburbs.
“On Aug. 18, 2023, CCEA responded to CCSD’s modified proposal asserting that CCEA was not interested in any one-time adjustment/lookback. When asked why, John Vellardita, Executive Director and negotiator for CCEA, stated they were opposed to the one-time adjustment/lookback because ‘it would only benefit white suburban teachers,’ ” the district wrote in its counterclaim, filed in September. “Since that time, CCEA has repeatedly stated there will be no contract with one-time adjustment/lookback. In so doing, CCEA has never walked back the racially inappropriate basis for opposing the one-time adjustment/lookback.”
Readily available demographics data from CCSD human resources shows that 63% of teachers districtwide identify as Caucasian. The data is not further broken down by school, region or experience levels.
“In negotiations, CCEA discriminated against its own bargaining unit in rejecting a neutral and reasoned proposal based on race,” the district said in a prehearing statement filed in October.
Robert Cowles, who is white, teaches social studies at Cimarron-Memorial High School. He has spent most of his 17 years in CCSD in inner-city schools. And, by his calculations, he will earn thousands of dollars less than a new hire with his qualifications.
“Vellardita saying that it would mostly benefit white people in the suburban schools might actually be true, but it doesn’t mean those teachers should be paid less. Given that the majority of teachers are women, it reeks of misogyny,” he said. “Most of the teachers I know who are being shortchanged work in the schools I’ve worked in. The majority of our students are Hispanic and qualify for free and reduced lunch. (They are) the very students who are more likely to have a substitute teacher, or a different teacher covering every day, instead of a fully qualified full-time teacher.”
The union argued to the contrary. It said in its prehearing statement that “CCEA consistently opposed CCSD’s proposed implementation of the lookback because it failed to address hard-to-fill positions.”
“CCEA drew a comparison between the suburbs and the urban core and accurately stated that CCSD’s proposal would put more funds into schools with fewer vacancies and that are higher performing,” the union said. “CCEA also maintained a lookback proposal in its last offer, so the lookback was never withdrawn.”
By December, though, the lookback was dead. And the complaint about the racial remarks was rendered moot when CCEA and CCSD agreed to dismiss the connected complaint about direct dealing.
Lawyers for CCEA and CCSD agreed to dismiss the day after it was heard, but did not publicly say why.
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