Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

School District’s $54 million boost could mean 900 jobs

Walt Rulffes

Walt Rulffes

As students get ready to return to class next week, the Clark County School District is getting ready to do some last-minute hiring.

But the job openings aren’t because the district procrastinated; they are because of the passage of the federal education jobs fund.

Superintendent Walt Rulffes said he will recommend that the school board allow principals to decide how to fill some of the 900 new positions.

In all, the district will receive about $54 million of the $83 million that came to Nevada from the $10 billion education jobs legislation signed by President Barack Obama on Aug. 10.

Rulffes said district staff will recommend to the school board that the money be used immediately to hire about 500 teachers, 300 support staff, 50 maintenance and landscape workers and a few school-based administrators, such as assistant principal and deans.

If the board approves the plan at its Sept. 2 meeting, Rulffes said the hiring could start Sept. 3.

“This is an employment bill, but it’s also intended to help students,” Rulffes said, which is why most of the hiring will be for people who work directly in the schools.

Two years ago, when the district had to cut a number of teaching positions, individual principals were given leeway to determine which positions to cut, he said.

“Now, I think we should reverse that process and allow principals to have discretion as to how those jobs will be aligned to the needs of their schools,” Rulffes said.

However, the positions are not guaranteed to exist for more than a year.

“One of the problems with this is it’s easy come, easy go; in other words, we’ll get the money but it will disappear after a year to approximately a year and a half depending on how it rolls out,” Rulffes said.

But the district can use the federal money to restore some of the teaching positions that have been cut while waiting to see what the economy and the Legislature do in the next year, the superintendent said.

“With this federal money, while it’s only a one-year reprieve, we hope (it) will be a bridge to connect us to better times and we’ll be able to continue with some of this employment permanently,” he said.

Many of the positions will likely be filled with people already in the district’s applicant pool, Rulffes said.

“We have hundreds of teachers who are now applying for jobs that we don’t have right now,” he said. “That’s quite a turnaround from two or three years ago when we were recruiting all over the world trying to find teachers to come to Las Vegas. So at this point the supply far exceeds the demand.”

The district already has hired about 430 new teachers for the school year, but it still has a few other openings, mostly in the hard-to-fill subjects of math and science.

In addition to the potential new jobs that will be funded with the federal money, the district had 126 teaching openings at elementary schools, 37 at middle schools and 61 at high schools as of Wednesday, said Martha Tittle, the district’s chief human resources officer.

Plus, the district is still looking for a few special education teachers, Tittle said.

Officials expect to have 309,126 students enroll this year, a 350-student decrease from the previous school year.

If students don’t show up where the district expects them, teachers will be shifted at the end of September.

But that balancing will be easier since the new teachers hired with federal funds should be starting about that time, Rulffes said. Principals might choose to use the new teaching positions to fill spots that would be eliminated in that shuffle, he said.

Join the Discussion:

Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Full comments policy