Editorial: Better pay for teachers

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 | 9:03 a.m.

With an enrollment of about 300,000 students, the Clark County School District has an insatiable need for teachers. The summer hiring season has less than a month to go before teachers are scheduled to report for work. The district has received commitments from about 1,100 new teachers, but this is more than 750 short of the need. Many of the as-yet unfilled positions are in specialized disciplines, such as mathematics and special education. The district hopes to fill most of those vacancies by stepping up its teacher recruitment program over the next two weeks.

Nevertheless, many of the positions will go unfilled and the district will depend heavily on substitute teachers, even for core subjects such as math. The reliance on substitutes -- the district needs about 5,000 of them to fill short- and long-term openings -- was evident last week. A new series of commercials aimed at attracting substitutes to the district was readied for airing. Inability to attract full-time teachers to fill every position has been a problem for years. Today, however, the problem is made worse by the high cost of housing in the Las Vegas Valley.

The average home price here is $300,000, which is out of reach for beginning teachers. Even the average monthly rent at an apartment is on the cusp of breaking the $800 barrier, and analysts see that price rapidly increasing. Mary Ella Holloway, president of the Clark County Education Association, told the Las Vegas Sun that her union is trying to work out some reduced-rental deals for incoming teachers. "Of course, paying them a better wage would be a solution to the problem," she said.

In Clark County, first-year teachers now receive a $2,000 signing bonus and a base salary of $28,491. That will rise a little, as teacher contracts are now being negotiated and the 2005 Legislature authorized a 2 percent increase for the coming school year and a 4 percent increase for the 2006-2007 school year. But that has to be compared with the nearly 90 percent increase in housing prices over the past five years in Clark County.

We believe that recruitment of teachers will get even harder in the coming years unless the Legislature comes to grips with the rising cost of living throughout Nevada, and especially in Las Vegas. This month the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, called upon school districts nationwide to set a minimum salary of $40,000 for new teachers. The reasoning is that a livable starting wage will encourage more talented people to enter the teaching profession -- and to make a career of it. With the cost of living soaring, many teachers in Clark County and around the country leave for higher paying jobs after just a few years of teaching.

Nevada must take note of such developments and realize that its tradition of low annual increases for teachers is jeopardizing the quality of education. What beginning teachers need, and all teachers for that matter, are salary adjustments that reflect their value to society.