Tuesday, May 7, 2024 | 2 a.m.
The Nevada Supreme Court won’t decide whether a lower court erred last year when it stepped in to stop large-scale sickouts by teachers during a labor dispute with the Clark County School District.
The state high court dismissed the Clark County Education Association appeal as moot late last week because the Clark County District Court, which issued the injunction in September, dissolved it at the union’s request in March.
The union at the time said that circumstances had changed — as of December, CCEA and CCSD had a new contract, ending the months of acrimonious negotiations leading to the rolling sickouts that disrupted and canceled classes at some district schools last fall.
But the dissolution didn’t immediately nullify the appeal, which the union promptly filed after the injunction was handed down on the grounds that it allegedly wasn’t lawfully issued in the first place.
However, the Supreme Court, in allowing the lower court to dissolve the injunction, ordered the union and district to file arguments as to why the appeal should or shouldn’t have been dropped altogether.
A three-judge panel sided with CCSD’s position that dissolving the injunction essentially meant there was no condition left to appeal.
“As respondent (CCSD) points out and appellants (CCEA) do not argue otherwise, this court could grant no effective relief even if appellants were to show that the preliminary injunction was improvidently granted, as the injunction already has been dissolved,” the Supreme Court’s decision read. “As a result, the appeal is moot.”
CCEA’s executive director did not return a message seeking comment.
A spokesman for CCSD said the district had no comment.
Nevada has a no-strike law for public employees, a group that includes teachers. The injunction against CCEA is the first and only one issued to stop a public-sector strike since the state outlawed such stoppages 55 years ago.
While the union got what it wanted with the dissolution, it presented the dissolution and the appeal as distinct concepts. CCEA’s lawyers characterized the dissolution as procedural. Injunctions, the union argued, are to address ongoing or impending strikes, not to be a permanent state.
The substance of CCEA’s appeal was that the injunction was vague, overbroad and unsupported by the evidence.
CCEA said the dissolution shouldn’t make the appeal moot because of a concept termed “capable of repetition yet evading review.” This means that the circumstances of the conflict were likely to repeat and the duration of an injunction would be relatively short.
The court order said the circumstances weren’t likely to repeat, though, as they are “highly fact-specific.”
“Indeed, for similar issues to recur, government employees must conduct ‘sick outs’ or similar activity in the face of stalled labor negotiations with their employer and the employer must seek an … injunction against an unlawful strike based on that activity,” the order said. “Whether and under what circumstances a similar issue will arise in the future is speculative, and we thus conclude that the capable-of-repetition-yet-evading-review exception does not apply here.”
The appeal was not CCEA’s only legal response to CCSD’s success in stopping the strike. The union has also filed a motion in district court to void the statute banning strikes, saying it runs afoul of the free speech and due process provisions guaranteed by the U.S. and state constitutions.
Additionally, the union has launched an initiative petition to overturn the law specifically for teachers. CCEA needs to gather roughly 102,000 valid petition signatures by Nov. 20 to get the item before the Nevada Legislature in January. If the signature gathering is successful, lawmakers would have 45 days to act upon it, and if they don’t, it automatically would be placed on the 2026 general election ballot.
Meanwhile, CCSD’s bid to have CCEA decertified as the collective bargaining agent for all 18,000 of CCSD’s teachers remains in play. The district filed a petition with the state Employee-Management Relations Board last summer to withdraw CCEA’s bargaining agent status because it had broken its contractual promise to not strike.
The state had put the district’s request on the back burner pending the outcome of the court case but did not dismiss it.
A status report on the matter is set for the labor board’s May 21 meeting.
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