By VERNON ROBISON
The Progress
The Clark County School Board approved a corrective action plan in a meeting held Wednesday, Aug. 3, after being notified in July that it was in violation of another element of the state’s reorganization law.
The instance of non-compliance was found by two independent magistrates in a June 9 dispute hearing between the Mack Lyon Middle School Organization Team (SOT) and the Clark County School District (CCSD).
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jhone Ebert then sent a noncompliance notice on July 5 to School Board President Irene Cepeda. The board was given 30 days to submit a plan for complying with the section of state law dealing with CCSD reorganization. That deadline was on Thursday, Aug 4; the day following last week’s meeting.
The 2017 law aimed to bring more autonomy to the local school level in CCSD, including areas of staffing and budgeting.
Ebert’s noncompliance notice cites a section of the Nevada Administrative Code, pointing to a requirement under the law for the district to have a “dispute resolution process for issues relating to retaliation and reprisal as a result of the performance of duties as a member of a (SOT).”
According to the June 9 hearing report, the Lyon SOT alleged that school principal and SOT member Ken Paul had been specifically targeted and retaliated against by CCSD central administrators in the fall of 2021. This was due to testimony Paul had given before the State Board of Education during the previous summer regarding his observation of the failings of the CCSD in its compliance with the reorganization law.
After a full hearing, the hearing officers found no evidence that Paul had been the victim of retaliation, according to the report.
The CCSD interpretation
In last week’s meeting, CCSD chief strategy officer Kellie Kowal-Paul, told the trustees that the July 4 notice of noncompliance had not been a surprise.
“In fact, we already had the plan for corrective action in draft form when we received a copy of the notice,” Kowal-Paul said.
She further explained that the current plan of corrective action was similar to a larger joint implementation plan which was laid out in 2018, also to bring the district into alignment with the reorrganization law. The final regulations for that plan are still in process but are currently reaching conclusion. So the idea was to fold regulations addressing this plan in with the previous one to address all of the problems at once, Kowal-Paul said.
“The recommendation is that we continue with our already in-progress development of a new regulation aligned with the regorganization,” Kowal-Paul said. “So the the plan for corrective action simply documents and puts a timeline around work we’re already doing and making sure that that work complies with this piece of the Nevada Administrative Code that we are found to be out of compliance with.”
Kowal-Paul also gave a broader interpretation into the findings of the hearing for the board at the meeting.
“The hearing found two things,” she claimed. “Number one, we were not at fault for retaliation; and, number two, the employee retaliation claims are not to be covered under this law. Rather they are to be covered under collective bargaining agreement. That is important to remmember in this plan.”
Transparency concerns
Trustees expressed mild frustration at not having all of the information regarding the hearing; and more important, not having that information available to the public in the public meeting materials.
Trustee Linda Cavazos noted that many of the detailed documents regarding the hearing were not made available to the public before the meeting.
Board legal counsel Nicole Malich responded that some of the documents had included “confidential information” and so had not been posted as public information.
But Cavazos pointed out that a constituent had sent her that same information claiming to have received it from a public source.
In a later public comment, Las Vegas resident and education advocate Ed Gonzalez confirmed that he had been the one to send the full and unredacted documents to Cavazos. He said that he himself had requested and received them from the State Superintendent’s office.
“I don’t believe that anything I sent was confidential,” he said.
“I think that it is important that there is clarification between what is confidential and what is not,” Cavazos concluded. “And that is not just for the trustees but also that the public understands what we are receiving. If there is something referred to in a document, and that document is not provided, there needs to be a reason.”
Trustee Danielle Ford asked if the new regulation would bring the board more into the process on details of retaliation claims and other disputes of this kind.
“As it currently is, we don’t get many details when we hear about things like this,” Ford said. “It is basically just telling us that this was investigated and trust us there was no retaliation. So we are kind of in a hard place. Will this (regulation) give us more oversight into making sure that our employees are not retaliated against?”
CCSD Superintendent Jesus Jara then reiterated Kowal-Paul’s earlier interpretation of the hearing. “Employee matters are handled through collective bargaining,” he said. “So this (dispute) process does not apply to employees. There is a collective bargaining process for discipline matters. And those are obviously personnel matters that stay confidential.”
Ford made the firm point that the trustees have been given no oversight into these dispute hearings. “Since this is something we are trying to comply with the state, I either want to communicate it to them that we don’t have that power or authority,” she said, “or else we need to find a way to ensure that the board is being notified of the details and ensure that the process and investigations are fair.”
Disputing the CCSD reading
Jara’s and Kowal-Paul’s interpretation into the hearing masters’ decision was strongly disputed in a public comment by Logandale resident and Lyon SOT member Lindsey Dalley who was in attendance at the meeting.
“I was involved in every step of that hearing,” Dalley said. “I testified at the hearing and I watched it; beginning to end. And I am here to tell you that this draft document does not resemble, at all, what happened at that hearing. There are false conclusions drawn all over the place here. And you, the trustees, need to understand that you are being kept in the dark on it.”
As Dalley reached the end of his one minute allowed comment, he asked President Cepeda to exercise her point of privilege and allow him to elaborate further. But Cepeda denied this request saying that any additional materials or comments could be sent in to district staff and entered by Dalley into the record.
“That is not going to happen before this vote, though,” Dalley interjected. “You guys are being kept in the dark on this!”
In a later interview with The Progress, Dalley explained the point further. He said that, in the hearing, the retaliation complaint had been turned on a legal technicality regarding some timing details of when Ken Paul’s immediate supervisor had been hired to the position in the overall timeline of the issue. Thus, the hearing masters could find no proof of the alleged retaliation in the proceeding, Dalley said.
But he also emphasized that this finding was never generalized to assume any sweeping ruling of the magistrates regarding employee discipline matters never being subject to retaliation charges in connection with the SOT.
Dalley pointed out that the SOT had originally written to the CCSD central administration with the retaliation complaint and asked that the district follow its required dispute procedures. But the district had responded with a letter insisting that the matter with Ken Paul was a confidential personnel issue which the SOT was not involved in.
Only after that did the SOT appealed that decision to the State, Dalley said.
“In spite of the district’s legal response, the state looked at it and took the case,” Dalley said. “They ordered the hearing; which shows that the employee discipline claim just does not apply. Otherwise the state would not ever have taken the case.”
Dalley said that the CCSD is interpreting the hearing findings to suit its own purposes.
“The problem is that CCSD has conflated this whole thing to claim that the dispute process required by the reorganization law should never include employee discipline issues,” Dalley said. “If they do that, then they just eliminate 75 percent of the SOT members from protection from retaliation. That would seriously undermine and weaken the effectiveness of the SOTs and would impact the autonomy that is supposed to be there. And actually, it is just not legal!”
