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Saturday, Aug. 7, 2010 | 2 a.m.
Sun Archives
Beyond the Sun
Sun archives
The Clark County School District long has had to cast a net across the nation to recruit an army of teachers. Just a few years ago, it was building almost a school a month and struggling to handle a flood of new students.
That was then.
This year, the district plans to hire only 230 or so teachers, a decades-low number. That is a tenth of what it hired only three years ago and only a quarter of what it hired last year, which was the previous record low.
One upside: The teachers are better qualified.
“One of the things that’s very different today is that positions have become very competitive” because of high unemployment, said William Garis, deputy human resources officer at the district. “We feel very good about the quality of the teachers coming in.”
The recession, state budget cuts and a flattening of student enrollment have all curbed hiring.
Moreover, officials in recent years have used the “97 percent rule”:
To avoid overhiring, for every 1,000 students, officials provide teachers to a school as if 30 students didn’t exist.
Emily Aguero, the district’s executive director for licensed personnel, said teacher hiring is largely based on student enrollment, which fluctuates in the run-up to the school year.
As of this week, she said, 234 teachers have been hired and up to 275 may be hired by Aug. 30, when the school year starts.
Still needed: math and science teachers for high schools, and teachers at all grades for the learning-disabled, known as “special needs” students.
Teacher pay ranges from $35,000 to $70,000 a year.
The hires reflect a stunning contraction.
In the boom time of the past two decades, some schools didn’t open on time and had to share rooms in other schools. In the late 1980s, enrollment was 111,000. It is now about 300,000.
For more than a decade, more than 70 schools operated without a summer break, a practice that will end this year because of flattening enrollment. As recently as 2006, to welcome, register and orient the freshman class of teachers, the district needed most of the huge floor of the indoor sports arena at the Cox Pavilion, where the UNLV basketball team practices.
This month, it will need, at best, the far smaller cafeteria at Coronado High School.
Despite the budget and economic pressures, the district has largely avoided teacher layoffs.
About 800 positions over the past several years have been eliminated through attrition, meaning death, migration, promotion and other circumstances led to unfilled jobs.
Still, the school district is huge. There are more than 18,000 teachers. It has 352 elementary, middle and high schools, as well as alternative schools. The budget for the current fiscal year is $2.1 billion. If it were a city, it would be the size of Pittsburgh. The district is the fifth-largest in the country, after Miami-Dade County, which is slightly larger. New York City is the largest, with more than 1 million students. And the district is hard to run.
One measure of its complexity is the makeup of the student body. About 150 countries are represented, or enough to fill most of the seats in the United Nations.
But even more than opening schools, filling them with desks, and turning on the lights, placing a schoolteacher in front of a blackboard is critically important.
A fourth-grade class, for example, has about 25 students under the age of 10, or about two dozen individual life stories.
An instructor teaches them all the subjects in primary education — reading, mathematics, history and science.
“It depends on the moment,” said Aguero, the personnel official and a former principal at Cartwright Elementary School, “but a teacher is someone who could affect a student for the rest of his life.”
The job becomes even more complicated by high school, said Garis, a former principal at Sierra Vista High School. Teaching becomes more specialized, with classes oriented toward specific vocations or for college preparation. Students move from subject to subject, different teacher to different teacher, chemistry to English to advanced-placement classes.
“We’re preparing the student for the next stage of his life,” Garis said. “It’s a huge job.”
How many fewer would be needed if Nevada adopted true immigration enforcement? Hundreds of millions would be cut from not just the state budget but county and city budgets as well.
What qualifications do teachers need to be hired in NV?
Most of the talk radio dittoheads don't care about education in Nevada because it involves "Mexicans."
On the downside what kind of work are all the "unemployed" teachers going to do?
Work at McDonalds?
As a retired biology teacher and 30 year clinical research manager for a major midwestern pharmaceutical company, I taught as a "guest" teacher (a.k.a. substitute) two years ago in Las Vegas. I lasted 3 months going from one school to another "experiencing" the various environments in Las Vegas middle and high schools. Thank God ( I repeat, thank God) I don't have kids going to these schools. I was continually threatened by students, students just walked out of my classes, the teachers I was filling in for left either poor or no lesson plans to follow and many of the school atmospheres were absolutely chaotic. This was not true of all schools, but so many so that I was absolutely shocked day after day. I wanted nothing more to do with the CCSD. I took a much more rewarding job working for $6 an hour handing out promotional gifts in a smoke-filled broken down local casino.
Comment removed by moderator. Reacting to comments that have now been removed.
Funding and salaries tied to performance, and national standards to get on par with global competitors, are long overdue. Research now in on charters exposes them as the non-solution they are. They do not produce any better result than public schools, only drain funds from them -- a cool site; Balkingpoints ; incredible satellite view of earth
Great info, reg373, and I agree with your comments. We need to identify the good teachers and pay them more, along with a nice bonus structure.
The flip side is that we need to identify the many bad teachers and FIRE them, not reassign and keep them on the payroll, but fire them and let them find a new line of work. I'm sure they care, but that's not enough, they need to have the knowledge and the ability to teach. That's a very special skill, and not everyone can do it, so we shouldn't think that everyone that gets past the initial hiring process deserves to stay in their position forever unless they commit a crime. Now is the time to find and hire some great teachers.
fvbump82, unfortunately you're not the first qualified teacher that I've heard from that's come in to our school system and walked away in disgust. Sad thing is that we NEED more GREAT science and math teachers. They should be treated like superstars!
school dist is in a buget situation so let me ask all of you this keep in mind budget so why is the ccsd paying a bunch of money to a company to hire a new superintendent so why dosent the board hire the new sup rather then payout thousand of dollars for someone else to do the hireing all you hear from ccsd is about how bad the money situation is and the cuts that need to be done there something wrong with this picture its time to make changes when they all come up for reelection dont you all think so
@fvbump82
I hear you. But I come from a different state and it's a different world teaching out here. I don't know how these principals do it with the high turnover. It's hard to establish a culture when turnover is that high. You also have to have nerves of steel teaching here and management skills beyond human capacity. My hat goes off to any teacher who sticks it out here.
Time is soooon to be here that HUGE decisions will be made because we have the largest budget shortfall in the U.S. and by a factor of 3 times the national average. Most money is spent on people and pensions so the wh0res who sold out Nevada to the unions will have to admit the gravy train stops here. The state will no doubt steal $ from the cities and counties and those wh0res will have to admit to the public unions that the gravy train stops here.
There are easy ways to fix this problem but it takes brains and not arrogence.
I could explain the simple fix for revenues but U will never get there if U can not start w/ salaries, pensions, illegas and the wh0re politicians
BANKRUPTSY must be decared, all gov. employees contracts and pensions must be nullified.
public employees need to be fired en mass and rehired at the national average (no execeptions)
NV needs a law for illegals like Arizona as those illegas are on the move and coming here
We are 3 billion short and loose at least 1 billion because of illegals alone, if u can't start with the obvious u will NEVER get there.
THAT SAID, let me add that Nevada currently spends about 1/3 of their budget on ed. I recently was in Texas for a few months; they spend 44%. I don't believe teachers are overpaid
BUT make no mistake, cops and fire earn average of 150K, this is triple the national average. STOP this abuse and there will be money for education.
Unfortunately, "better qualified" teachers doesn't mean much in this school district. Too little too late I'm afraid.
Serious about reform? Let's talk about finding better qualified CCSD administrators.
fuq u
Isn't it amazing that Jim Rogers offered to take over the Superintendents job with no salary for up to three years and the board hires an outside company to search for a new Superintendent. More money wasted. It shows a lack of intelligence on the boards part. Rogers is a smart businessman and was a part of the UNLV board of regents. I would guess he frightens the CCSD to have a hard nosed businessman come in and clean house which I have no doubt that is what he would do.
The problem here in CA with undocumented/illegal immigrant students is that if they are "English Learners" then any teacher who even one of them in class must get re-qualified to teach, regardless of any other qualifications, degrees, credentials, experience, evaluations, or subject area.
We have to get Certification and Authorization to teach the class (all students) because of one kid. This entails 6-8 courses at a University, anywhere from 18-24 units, or we become "inactive" and unassigned, another way of saying unemployed (fired).
That's the biggest injustice, the fact that experienced teachers are no longer "fit" or qualified for the job they've had for 25-30 years because a kid who quite often is not even be a legal resident happens to land in their class. We, as teachers, have to get re-qualified to teach a kid who is un-qualified. Don't get me started ...
Please excuse my typos in the previous comment. Seems the more my blood boils the more mistakes I make. I have to learn to calm down. I'm working on it ...