Editorial: Tracking our teachers

Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006 | 7:33 a.m.

It took Nevada Board of Education officials nearly two years to bar from the classroom a Clark County substitute teacher who had pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting an 8-year-old boy and consequently was sent to prison.

According to a story by Las Vegas Sun reporter Emily Richmond on Tuesday, substitute teacher Robert G. Stevenson pleaded guilty to the charge about two years ago, but the state Board of Education didn't ban him from classrooms until Saturday.

Board member Gary Waters called the lapse "appalling," and added, "We've got to take licenses away from these guys in a timely fashion." That is an understatement. Results of a recent Legislative Counsel Bureau audit of the state Education Department show that the department lacks procedures for tracking criminal cases involving teachers.

It wasn't the only deficiency auditors discovered. Of 50 randomly selected department employees, 78 percent had not received the required annual job performance evaluations. The department also overpaid new teacher signing bonuses by $230,000 because it paid some of these new hires more than once. And it also failed to verify some of the information supplied by local districts that applied for some of the $117 million the department doled out in 2005 for class-size reduction plans.

Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie, D-Reno, actually praised the Education Department, calling it "refreshing" because "it admits its mistakes." Nonetheless, it is troubling that the Education Department allows convicted child predators to keep their teaching licenses for two years or wastes $230,000 because it can't keep track of whom it has paid.

Education Department officials say they are going to ask the 2007 Legislature to fund more staff so it can adequately track teacher licenses and fix some of these other problems. But that session, and any funding that would come from it, is months away. State education officials need to put to better use their current resources to make sure criminals are kept out of our children's classrooms.