Lombardo appoints compliance monitor to CCSD, demands corrective action

The Clark County School District soon will have a monitor checking its actions, Gov. Joe Lombardo and Nevada Superintendent of Public Instruction Jhone Ebert announced on Monday.

“Clark County students, teachers, and families deserve to have confidence in their school district,” Lombardo said in the announcement. “As I’ve reiterated since taking office, unprecedented funding requires unprecedented accountability, and we will not accept a lack of accountability for our school district.”

After receiving its largest amount of funding of $4 billion in the last legislative session, CCSD announced in September that it was facing a potential budget deficit.

On Monday, Ebert sent a letter to Interim Superintendent Brenda Larsen-Mitchell and Clark County School Board President Evelyn Garcia Morales notifying them of the district’s lack of compliance with laws pertaining to financial support of a school system and alternative school management.

CCSD did not respond to the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Monday.

The Nevada Department of Education also appointed Yolanda King of King Strategies LLC to serve as compliance monitor for the district. King will work with the district to submit a corrective action plan to Ebert by Dec. 27. The district will be required to implement the plan by Jan. 9.

As compliance monitor, King will be allowed to attend any meetings related to the reorganization and operations of CCSD. Her written report will be an agenda item at each school board meeting.

“I’m not surprised,” Clark County Education Association Executive Director John Vellardita said Monday. “The school district should have seen it coming.”

Previous questioning

The decision comes after multiple exchanges between Ebert and Larsen-Mitchell in which Ebert sent public letters requesting information about the district’s budget issues.

“After reviewing those responses, NDE remains concerned about the District’s leadership, policies, and processes that prevented CCSD’s local school precincts from receiving timely and accurate funding information prior to the start of the 2024-25 school year,” Ebert wrote in Wednesday’s letter.

In its latest estimation, the school district said it was facing a potential $10 million central budget deficit, which it has blamed on spending $53 million in litigation and $15 million in cybersecurity costs.

In addition to the central budget deficit, the school district failed to include updated teacher salaries and used the incorrect formula for at-risk funding in its projected budget last January. When schools were notified of the error in September, many were left with operating costs hundreds of thousands, if not millions, higher than anticipated, leading principals to cut staff, programming and supplies.

In Larsen-Mitchell’s responses to Ebert’s previous letters, she acknowledged a failure to provide up-to-date information to local school precincts and said that CCSD did not have processes and procedures in place to adequately manage new information received by the district after Jan. 15.

Also in that letter and in presentations to the School Board, Larsen-Mitchell had identified the root causes of the budget issues as “insufficient process documentation and communication and organizational and process silos.”

Ebert said that the failure to update the information had hindered NDE’s ability to have oversight over the school district.

She also said that the failure to provide information to schools had not been in compliance with reorganization law, as local school precincts had been unable to control their plan of operations.

Cooperation with school board

“It wasn’t just Jhone Ebert that didn’t have answers,” Trustee Isaac Barron told the Las Vegas Review-Journal Monday evening.

In previous board meetings, Barron had pressed Larsen-Mitchell and other administrators on what he saw as an inadequate explanation for how the budget issues occurred.

He said that he did not see the compliance monitor as a bad thing, and praised King — who serves as the president of the Nevada Taxpayers Association — for her experiencing managing local government.

Barron also hoped that with over half the voting members of the School Board being set to be replaced come January, the trustees can work to regain the public’s trust, which he said the current board had violated.

Vellardita said that he believed some trustees wanted to do the right thing and that the compliance monitor “can’t hurt.”

“There should be absolute cooperation,” he said.

Other intervention

The school district is no stranger to outside oversight.

In October, The Nevada Department of Taxation appointed a subcommittee to monitor the budget and fiscal activities of the school district. The subcommittee will make a recommendation in January on whether the department’s committee on local government finance should place the school district on a fiscal watch.

Lombardo has also called on the Legislature to expand an ongoing performance audit of the CCSD to include the potential shortfall, examine how the district allocates funding to individual schools and determine how those processes might have broken down.

In response, State Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro and Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager announced a mid-December Interim Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on Education Accountability.

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Contact Katie Futterman at kfutterman@reviewjournal.com. Follow @ktfutts on X and @katiefutterman.bsky.social.