CCSD blames a 2017 law for teacher vacancies

The Clark County School District is no stranger to teacher vacancies. But how those vacancies are distributed is far from equal.

Of the school district’s 700 teacher vacancies, 570 are in Title I schools, Interim Superintendent Brenda Larsen Mitchell told the State Board of Education on Wednesday. That’s 80 percent of vacancies in the low-income schools that receive federal funding. Around 60 percent of CCSD’s schools are Title I.

The district said that the 2017 law designed to grant more power to individual schools has contributed to this inequity. Individual principals are motivated to do what is best for their schools, Chief Strategy Officer Kellie Kowal-Paul said Wednesday. That means that suburban schools with more resources can fill their vacancies more easily, while the schools in the urban core are left with vacancies.

“The district has a responsibility to provide all students in Clark County with an equal education opportunity,” Kowal-Paul said. “But we do not have the ability to ensure that educators are distributed equitably across schools.”

Assembly Bill 469, passed in 2017, requires CCSD to decentralize and transfer more decision-making and budgetary power to principals and schools.

While she said the bill was designed with making the money follow the student, Kowal-Paul said that this has proven not to be the full picture.

“The dollar is not the unit of equity,” Kowal-Paul said. “The unit of equity is the teacher.”

The school district’s adherence to the law has been heavily debated in the years since, and Wednesday’s meeting was designed to check in to the district’s level of compliance.

The district said that it was still not in compliance with two components: gathering data on information related to vacancies for which a substitute teacher was selected, and collecting information from principals and bargaining groups related to the election of school organizational team members. The district said it has plans to be in compliance with both soon.

But John Vellardita, the executive director of the Clark County Education Association teacher’s union, said that in the years since the bill was passed, he had never heard CCSD connect the law to teacher vacancies.

“We just don’t buy it,” he said.

He said the issue was complex with many variables including compensation and support for both students and teachers there. As it is, teachers who opt to teach in Title I schools receive $5,000 more.

Vellardita also pointed specifically to safety. In a recent CCEA study, 40 percent of teachers said that they had experienced at least one physical assault by a student in the past year.

It would not work for the district to force teachers were forced into Title I schools, Vellardita said.

“If teachers were forced to go, they would quit,” Vellardita said. “People have to want to be there.”

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