Nevada proposal could make state schools more attractive to teachers from abroad

Legislation would reform the conditions for public schools that employ teachers from other countries teaching in Nevada under J-1 and H-1B visas.

According to the U.S. Department of State, J-1 visas allow temporary stays in the United States for “exchange visitor programs” that include teaching. H-1B visas allow temporary stays for workers in “specialty occupations.”

The legislation would require districts to conduct orientations for visa holders to aid their transition to the district and the local community; require districts to offer professional development; outline standard operating procedures, including the timing of arrival and departure and housing and transportation costs; request stipend funding to cover related fees for the agencies that help bring teachers over; and prohibit districts from partnering with entities that charge more than a certain amount for those fees.

Proposals in the Nevada Assembly and Nevada Senate last year attempted to put some of these reforms into place, but the bills died.

The Joint Interim Standing Committee on Education also plans to send several letters to agencies and lawmakers regarding international teacher programs. One letter will go to Congress asking to increase the annual cap for new J-1 visas and to allow international teachers to stay five years instead of the current three, so they can become vested in the state pension system. Another will go to school districts encouraging them to apply to become designated J-1 sponsors to help minimize agency fees for visa holders and encourage them to see if H-1B visas might be a better fit. And another letter will go to the Nevada Department of Education also asking it to consider being a sponsor.

RoAnn Triana, the chief of human resources for the Clark County School District, told lawmakers in July that the district has hired J-1 teachers, largely from the Philippines, for years. The district planned to have about 175 J-1 teachers this year from the Philippines, plus Kenya, Belize, Jamaica, India, Colombia and Portugal.

Assemblywoman Erica Mosca, D-Las Vegas, a former teacher, said she often heard from constituents about J-1 teachers. Mosca is the daughter of a Filipino immigrant and the first Filipina-American in the Legislature.

“It is the No. 1 thing that people actually talk to me about,” she said. “Even last week, I was at an AAPI small-business roundtable with the acting secretary of labor and it was an issue that the business owners actually brought up.”

School counselors

Legislation would remove language in state law that says that every public school should have a full-time counselor and a comprehensive counseling program “to the extent that money is available for that purpose.” Thus, this proposed change would require every public school to have both a full-time counselor and a comprehensive program.

Assemblywoman Alexis Hansen, R-Sparks, said she wanted schools to have counselors but wasn’t comfortable with compelling schools to hire them because that would be micromanaging districts.

Assemblywoman Natha Anderson, D-Sparks, and a high school teacher, said counselors could have caseloads of 350 to 450 students.

“I understand what the assemblymember is saying about the school districts, but unless we start making this a priority, we will never be able to have enough counselors in our schools,” she said.

Absenteeism dashboard

Legislation would require the Nevada Department of Education to post a publicly viewable, real-time attendance data dashboard online to identify trends in absenteeism.

To make this work, school districts will need to report attendance information daily.

Chronic absenteeism, which the state Department of Education defines as being absent on 10% or more of enrolled school days, has surged since the pandemic. Statewide, Nevada’s chronic absenteeism rate went from 18.8% in the 2018-19 school year to 36% in 2021-2022, the first full in-person year after the COVID-19 closures, according to state data. CCSD’s rates, though similarly improving, were a little worse than the state’s overall data.

The idea for a daily attendance dashboard comes from a presentation on chronic absenteeism that the committee received in March.

Autumn Rivera, an education policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures, told the committee that chronic absenteeism has improved nationally but it still has not returned to prepandemic levels.

“Since attendance rates are usually released at the end of the school year, the lack of that real-time data may be hindering some of that postpandemic progress because it takes us a bit to be able to work with it,” she said.

Rivera referenced an attendance tracker maintained by the Rhode Island Department of Education as an example of this kind of dashboard.

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