By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
Upheaval at the Clark County School District (CCSD) was once again in the news last week as an ongoing labor dispute between the district and the Clark County Education Association (CCEA) came to a head.
The CCSD Board of Trustees was forced to abruptly end a meeting on Thursday night due to security concerns. A rowdy showing of hundreds of outraged teachers filled the auditorium at Liberty High School for the meeting, threatening to strike if a solution couldn’t be reached.
Trying to calm the heated crowd, School Board President Lola Brooks stated that the board was limited in what could be done because of ongoing budget concerns.
“Your anger is displaced,” Brooks said to an increasingly vocal crowd. “But it is our job to absorb it.”
The board tried to open the meeting with public comment to provide an outlet to the anger. But while a long list of educators had signed up to speak, only a few were able to do so. Amid angry shouts of ‘Shame on you!’, the trustees were forced to withdraw from the meeting hall citing security concerns.
All of this brought the impasse another step closer to a major teacher strike which the union has threatened for September 10.
The discussion between the union and the district over a 2019-2021 contract for teachers came to a stalemate earlier this month. At the heart of the impasse are promised salary advancements for teachers who have completed a complex matrix of professional development requirements. This matrix was established for teachers in a Negotiated Agreement reached with CCEA in 2016.
The Agreement established “column advancements” which rewarded teachers for receiving continued education and for taking added leadership roles at their schools. After a three-year interval of meeting those requirements, eligible teachers had been promised an increase in pay of just over $5,000 per year.
Trusting in this agreement, about 2,600 CCSD educators have spent the past three years completing the requirements. But now CCSD officials are claiming that it lacks the funding to follow through with the column advancement raises. They say that doing so would cost approximately $19 million that the district simply doesn’t have in its budget.
That is disappointing to teachers who have worked hard to meet the requirements.
Mack Lyon Middle School teacher Dennis Jarrel has spent the past couple of years working on a Master’s degree which should have qualified him for the increase.
“It feels completely unfair to me,” Jarrel said in an interview last week. Jarrel said that he had put significant efforts into the requirements, working every weekend and every night for nearly 3 years to complete his coursework. In addition, he also did about 250 hours in an apprenticeship with his school administration over the three years.
“I’m not a greedy person, but I was really counting on that additional money to help out,” Jarrel said. “I just don’t think it is unreasonable when you are told by an employer that; if you put in the time, you will be compensated; that it should actually happen. I don’t think it should be unrealistic for me to actually expect that.”
Kim Bunker, also a teacher at MLMS, is in a similar situation. She completed a Masters degree as well as a host of complex requirements needed for a column advancement.
“It was actually a very complicated and difficult process to meet those requirements,” Bunker said. “In addition to actually doing the work, there was a lot of paperwork in tracking and reporting your progress. It was not easy to complete it.”
Bunker said that many teachers had looked at the three years’ worth of requirements and had simply dismissed it as not worth the effort. But she had worked through the process in anticipation of improving her skillset and of receiving the increased pay.
“It turns out that they were right, I guess,” Bunker said of her colleagues who didn’t participate in the program. “It doesn’t seem like it was worth it at all. I don’t know if I will ever receive that advancement in pay. It is frustrating!”
In a press statement last week, CCSD officials touted that they had offered a teacher package that would fulfill the requirements of the 2016 agreement. This offer entailed a 3 percent raise, 2 percent step increase and a 4 percent increase to monthly health insurance contribution, according to the statement.
But that reportedly left no money for the column advancements. “With apparently $69 million on the table, a request for additional funding would only cause a greater deficit for our district and, in return, our children,” CCSD Superintendent Jesus Jara said in the CCSD statement.
CCEA officials responded that the raises were not a concession being offered by the district but rather items that were already assured to the teachers by the state legislature earlier this year.
In addition to the column advancement, the CCSD offer also failed to address a freeze on step increases in the current year, as well as a defacto decrease in teacher salaries caused by a .625% increase in PERS costs, a CCEA statement said.
“CCSD has offered nothing to educators,” the CCEA statement said. “The money on the table is the result of the Governor and Speaker Frierson’s leadership, and through the efforts of thousands of educators.”
The looming strike leaves principals in a precarious position in managing their schools. Local principals say that it is yet unclear how many of their teachers will walk off on the strike, and how many will stay in the classrooms. This makes planning for running the school very difficult, said MLMS principal Ken Paul.
“I am hoping that we have a good enough relationship with our teachers that we will know how many will be gone that day,” Paul said. “But no one really knows at this point.”
Paul said that one thing is clear: There wouldn’t be enough substitute teachers in the community to cover for a widespread teacher strike. That might mean taking desperate measures to manage the large number of kids left in school.
“We have been talking about maybe gathering students in larger groups and doing something with them that way,” Paul said. “But that starts to look more like babysitting than education.”
“I’d expect that parents, knowing that teachers are going to be gone, will probably not send their kids in to school,” Paul added. “But with things so much in flux on this, it is definitely hard to make plans.”
