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Wednesday, April 6, 2011 | 4:38 p.m.
Sun Coverage
The Clark County School District would eliminate 2,500 staff positions if a tentative budget approved Wednesday is given final approval.
The budget includes cuts of more than $407 million, district officials said. It also includes pay cuts and benefit concessions that add up to an 8 percent reduction, however, the reductions have to be negotiated with employee unions.
In addition, the budget calls for larger class sizes, changing class schedules for more than 100 schools, reducing textbook and supply budgets and cuts in administrative budgets.
The tentative budget was approved in a special Clark County School Board meeting Wednesday. The budget will come to the board again for adoption at its May 18 meeting.
Reality sucks.
Surely it helps to build a better community when we take money from working people and children in school who are suffering instead of from the rich, foreign mining corporations that have made billion off of this recession.
Right?
Teachers:
Prepare to strike. There is absolutely nothing that could be done in response to a teacher strike. The school district and the state do not have the capacity to replace the staff of the 5th largest school district in the country. You have the power in that scenario.
CCSD School Board:
Grow some stones and stand up to the governor. You represent approximately 75% of the population of this state when it comes to education. Adopting a budget that calls for workers and students to give up pay, benefits, textbooks and jobs is not a reasonable or appropriate action.
Clark County residents:
Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions.
Making the school environment more difficult and less rewarding to teach in will only have a negative impact on student achievement. Asking people who have already made concessions for the past 11 years to do so again is only going to worsen the situation in CCSD, not improve it.
It is time for education to man up and do with the reources they have. They can not expect more money as they have squandered away taxpayer dollars terribly. Grow up and deal with it!
@rejecto: Teacher's don't have any say in how the money is spent. If you asked most teachers, it would be spent in radically different ways. Maybe you should ask the custodians and bus drivers if they're the ones responsible for "squandering" the money, or ask the teachers who (probably) live down the street.
And Nevada DOES have the resources, but politicians think that it's easier to shaft working men and women then it is to ask rich people to pay their fair share.
rejecto, what an appropriate name.
Teachers have taken hits to their compensation each year for the past eleven years. They have done more with less every year for a decade.
Wonder why problems in this school district are as bad as they are? It isn't the false notion that teachers get paid too much.
How about the fact that tens of thousands of students in this district don't speak the language. How is a teacher supposed to teach students who can't understand the language of the lesson? We're not just talking about Spanish here either. Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, Samoan... the list goes on.
How about the fact that the school district cannot provide adequate materials to educate the students.
How about the fact that students are crammed into classrooms like sardines, with up to 70 per class in some of the specials.
How about the fact that students are "learning" in single wide trailers re-purposed as makeshift classrooms, with some schools having as many as a dozen of these "portables."
Cutting teacher pay and teacher jobs isn't going to solve any of these problems. In fact, it will make them significantly worse. Brian Sandoval is refusing to consider taxes on foreign businesses in this state, and is instead instituting a stealth tax on a few thousand people based on no criteria other than their profession.
"Conservatives" refuse to even consider the fact that corporations have gotten away with shirking tax responsibility for years, and instead try to adopt additional tax cuts for businesses, all the while cutting pay and benefits on working people to balance budgets.
The conservative agenda is nothing more than robbing people who make $50,000 a year to pay people who make $50 million. Taxpayers DO NOT benefit from budget cuts in schools or public services. Your tax bill WILL NOT go down. You WILL NOT pay less tax on purchases. You money will just be going to fund tax breaks for millionaires.
Figure this shat out people. You are being robbed by people with an (R) next to their names.
@rejecto. In 2009, Mining had gross revenue of 5.8 BILLION. After taking all of the allowed deducations under state law, the net profit was 1.8 BILLION. Their annual reports showed record dividends to stock holders. The amount of taxes paid to the state of Nevada, 48.6 MILLION. In 2010, the gaming industry reported 5.8 BILLION in gross gaming revenue, and paid 416 MILLION to the State. For other businesses, such as Walmart, Target, the banks, and other national companies, they paid a 1.17% payroll tax and unemployment insurance taxes. They paid NO taxes on corporate profits earned in Nevada.
Please explain why any business would want to move to Nevada, one of the worst states in the country for education and it will get worse with the funding cuts. Why should any teacher move to Nevada, and how can we keep the ones we have? How much learning do you think is going to happen in a classroom with over 40 kids in it, and that is a high school math class. Other classes will be larger.
How do you expect results when kids don't come to school on a regular basis, don't do homework, or classwork, and their parents don't care.
If you truly care about the future of Nevada, contact your state legislators and tell them the cuts to education are penny-wise and pound foolish. The level of cuts will hurt the state for years to come. What do you think is going to happen to this state in 5 years? Here's a hint, what happened to the casinos the last time gas hit $4 a gallon.
keystone6,
Public employees in the State of Nevada can not strike so that idea is not going anywhere.
Even my students, labeled as some of the "worst" students in the district understand the absurdity of this situation. Today, students were reading news articles and discussing current events - while this is not an exact quote from one of my students, it's pretty close.
"Really? They think that giving the school less money is going to make things better? We already have the worst test scores in America because the teachers are too busy chasing after 50 students that don't give a damn to actually spend time with those of us that do and teach us what we need to know. More students, less money and you expect us to pass our proficiencies. Oh, wait... AND we have to cut band, art and other cool classes that make school interesting. Awesome. Maybe I should just drop out now."
Another 2500 people out of work here in Nevada? That should do wonders for the economy! Austerity just means a longer pull out of a bleak economy. Things will be better, but it will definitely hurt in the short term.
vegaslee:
Public employees can do whatever the hell they want. Sandoval does not have the stones to fire an entire school district's worth of teachers who strike in protest of his deliberately punitive and absurdly prejudicial budget. Trying to fire teachers who strike would be political suicide, and Sandoval knows damned well that Republicans in this state would die a painful political death if 50,000 people showed up in Carson marching against them.
Just ask Scott Walker and the Wisconsin right how it feels to be put under that kind of microscope. Sandy's future national ambitions would be torpedoed and he knows it.
But its cool, vegaslee. Go ahead and threaten middle class workers some more. There is going to be a reckoning in this country, and the line is going to be drawn between people who support corporations, and people who support the middle class.
Any rational person will agree that these cuts suck, period. But there is little that can be done about it given our current political environment.
The only real solution is to elect people to office that that will enact practical solutions to our problems without regard to special interest groups or party ideology.
Less than 10% in cuts and some are acting like we're ELIMINATING K-12. Cuts hurt but more cuts are inevitable UNLESS WE REMOVE 100,000 ILLEGAL STUDENTS from our class rooms. FIRE 140,000 illegals employed in Nevada and our economy REBOUNDS. Our 99ers need jobs. Then they can rent and share housing.... They can buy a few things and our sales tax revenue goes up. AND NEXT BIENNIUM DOESN'T HAVE TO BE AS BAD.
P Regan fired the striking controllers and NEVER HIRED THEM BACK. Think before you act. Might even think before you talk and blog. Teachers are acting like immature spoiled toddlers, not like adults with common sense and decorum, not like someone we want in a class room with our children.
@roseanrose. I'm a teacher, come spend a week in my classroom.
Tanker: you emulate your students? Not a good idea. I consider it a given, or it should be, that anyone pursuing a career in teaching, likes being in a class room, likes students / people of the age one would teach, has an even temper, well tolerates bureaucratic policies, can present educational material in a manner to interest students...
keystone6,
I am not looking to see Teachers take a cut of a single dime.
I am closer to this situation then I wish to be though.
I am looking for realistic problem solvers, not pie in the sky suggestions as you keep posting about.
Be careful what you ask for, you just might receive it.
Vegaslee:
Expecting teachers to stand up for themselves is pie in the sky now?
What kind of world do you live in where it is more acceptable for a select group of people to be berated and attacked consistently, year after year, and call it a "pie in the sky" suggestion for them to hit back?
Realistic problem solvers no longer exist in this state or in this country.
Look at the republican wunderkind Paul Ryan. His budget proposal, lauded by the right, calls for $4 trillion in spending cuts, but will only work if the unemployment rate reaches 2.8%, if medicare is privatized, if medicaid is practically eliminated, and oh yeah, if we cut taxes for the rich and corporations while raising taxes on the other 90% of us.
All of that instead of equitable taxation of the rich and corporations.
Reasonable problem solving is impossible when 25% of the Fortune 500 pays no tax on profit. Reasonable problem solving no longer exists when the accepted logic of half of the country is that people making $250K don't make enough, while people making $50K make too much.
This country has run completely off the rails. If you are as close to this problem as you suggest, you need to sack up and fight this, and I mean literally fight it if necessary.
The bullsh!t assertion that the state can dictate whether workers can strike is just that - bullsh!t. It is a scare tactic meant to keep the little people in line. Until we the peons actually take drastic measures to stand up against bad government and corporate greed, we'll continue to be treated like we don't matter.
I for one challenge Sandoval to try to be the next Scott Walker. I don't think the s.o.b. has the stones to fire 20,000 teachers.