Teachers protest outside the Clark County School District Education Center on Flamingo Road before a school board meeting Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023. The Clark County School District and the Clark County Education Association, the teachers union, are in contract negotiations.
Saturday, Dec. 16, 2023 | 2 a.m.
A panel of state lawmakers cited an incomplete application when it put off considering the Clark County School District’s request for $58.1 million to give support professionals raises using a new matching fund created this year to boost educator pay, even though communications between the state and district show that CCSD included all the required elements in its submission.
The application packet — submitted for the Wednesday meeting of the Interim Finance Committee, a body of state lawmakers that makes various funding decisions between Nevada’s regular biennial legislative sessions — was for a share of that Senate Bill 231 money.
The bill, passed in June, dedicated $250 million statewide for two years’ worth of raises for both teachers and support workers like classroom aides, clerical staff and bus drivers.
Assemblywoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno, who chairs the Interim Finance Committee, “deferred” CCSD’s request after several district support staffers offered testimony on what the raises would mean to them, but before district officials could present their case or answer lawmaker questions.
Monroe-Moreno, D-North Las Vegas, said applications for SB231 funds are “supposed to have” a plan for budgeted increases for teacher and support professional pay.
“The plan from CCSD does not encompass all of that,” she said.
‘There is not a complete plan’
State guidance on preparing applications, though, does not require that teacher and support staff requests be bundled together.
SB 231 raises are designed to be in addition to raises included in contract renewals. For support staff, they would have been worth about 4%, and on top of the raises guaranteed in this summer’s contract renewal of 8.65% this year and 2% next year.
There is nothing yet to supplement for teachers though, as CCSD remains locked in a bitter impasse with the teachers union, with no clear idea of when pending arbitration will be resolved.
“This body hears what you have said. We acknowledge it. We knew that during the legislative session. That is exactly why we made sure that the $250 million was appropriated for this purpose,” Monroe-Moreno said, addressing the support workers in the meeting room. “However, because there is not a complete plan, we are going to defer this until we have a complete plan brought before this body.”
In emails that the Sun received through a public records request, it was clear that CCSD only submitted a request on behalf of support staff when it filed its application Nov. 9. But that did not prevent placing it on the committee’s Wednesday agenda.
Guidance that legislative fiscal analysts sent to all districts in August says applications must include the amount and percentage of the budgeted increase in salaries; documentation that the district has budgeted for raises aside from the SB 231 boosts; and a signed statement from the superintendent affirming that the application is accurate.
CCSD’s application packet included a brief district-level SB 231 fiscal analysis; evidence of the additional budgeted pay increase; a memorandum of agreement with the Education Support Employees Association union to negotiate SB 231 funds; a summary of the School Board’s approval of the current ESEA contract; the approved language of the contract itself; and a signed statement from Superintendent Jesus Jara.
While the state fiscal analyst working with the district asked some clarifying questions, and about whether CCSD plans on submitting future proposals for SB 231 funds, he did not indicate that the application was incomplete.
In bold type, CCSD government relations director Patricia Haddad responded to the analyst that “CCSD has yet to reach agreements with CCEA or POA.”
CCEA is the Clark County Education Association teachers union. POA is the union for the district police department’s rank-and-file officers who are also eligible for SB 231 raises.
“Upon reaching agreements and satisfactory supplemental agreements related to using SB 231 funds, CCSD will submit additional proposals for SB 231 funds,” she wrote.
The guidance allows for multiple applications, suggesting that teacher and support staff requests don’t have to be made simultaneously.
“School districts may reach an agreement with their various collective bargaining units at various times throughout the 2023-25 biennium and therefore a school district may submit multiple requests for SB 231 funding,” the document stated.
Another, open-ended thing that the guidance acknowledged: legislator discretion.
“Senate Bill 231 does not provide any specifications on how the funds must be proportionally allocated to the school districts’ employee bargaining units; however, the IFC has the ultimate authority in approving an allocation of the funds from SB 231 based on the school district’s request for such funding.”
Letter-writing campaign
District and union reaction to the committee decision was swift.
CCSD said the delay was “unconscionable” and that lawmakers didn’t follow their own guidelines.
ESEA and Teamsters Local 14 — which represents some support staff alongside ESEA — said in a joint statement that the delay was a “heartwrenching betrayal.”
“We are hugely disappointed and urge all of our members to speak up and insist that our promised funds be dispersed in a timely manner, without waiting on the teachers unions,” the unions added. “Our members don’t have another six months to waste.”
To that end, ESEA and Teamsters Local 14 launched a letter-writing campaign to lawmakers. ESEA President Jan Giles said that as of Thursday evening, the organizations had collected about 1,000 letters.
The $58.1 million that CCSD sought for support staffers is about a third of the $173.8 million that the state proportionally allocated to CCSD overall. The district has said police would get $1 million, and teachers would get the balance.
ESEA represents about 13,000 people.
In a note sent Thursday directly to support professionals, Jara wrote that “unfortunately and unbelievably, before CCSD could present our plan, the IFC announced — without notice — that they were deferring our request despite months of planning and discussion with legislators and the Legislative Counsel Bureau.”
Because the committee is not scheduled to meet again until February, SB 231 raises now won’t hit paychecks until March at the earliest, Jara said.
Before the committee’s deferral, Erica Nungaray, a registrar at an east Las Vegas middle school, told members that the lowest-paid support staffers make about $25,000 a year. The bottom of the pay scale is $15 an hour, and while some people may work eight hours a day, most aren’t called in to work during the summer.
Support workers “will not be buying houses, cars or taking lavish trips with our raise,” she said. “What you will hopefully provide today with this raise is an extra tank of gas to go to work and serve our Nevada children (and) in many instances to get to our second jobs.”
Terri Shuman, a teacher’s aide at an east Las Vegas elementary school, told lawmakers about a fellow aide who naps at school during lunchtime because he also works as a rideshare driver and a private security guard.
She waited for the next public comment period at the end of the meeting, several hours after the CCSD item was deferred, to tell the committee its vote was a “stab … in the back.”
“Separate us from what CCEA is doing,” she said. “They have not had it together in I don’t know how long. But support staff is working hard to keep it together.”
The executive director and a spokesman for CCEA did not respond to repeated requests for comment on behalf of their members.
But at the Sept. 28 meeting, when the School Board tentatively allotted the $58.1 million to ESEA, pending state approval, CCEA Vice President Jim Frazee used similar logic as Monroe-Moreno.
“The law does not allow you to do this. It is not your money to divide up,” he said. “It is to be collectively bargained, and until all units are collectively bargained, it cannot go forward. You have not reached an agreement with your largest bargaining unit representing 18,000 teachers. You’ve walked away from the table and declared impasse.”
Frazee also said that the Nevada State Education Association, ESEA’s state-level parent union, spoke against SB 231 (NSEA frequently told lawmakers that it preferred a “clean” 20% raise across the board.)
“Don’t come with your hand out on this money now,” he said.
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