Students start their first full-day of kindergarten at James B. McMillan Elementary School in Las Vegas on Aug. 29, 2016.
Sunday, Aug. 11, 2019 | 2 a.m.
Students returning to Las Vegas-area schools this week are more likely to be taught by a long-term substitute or another unlicensed professional than in past years.
The number of teacher vacancies in the Clark County School District has crept up to 750 ahead of the 2019-20 school year, which begins Monday. That is 200 more vacancies than there were on the first day of school in 2018, said Tya Mathis-Coleman, director of diversity and high-need areas recruitment at CCSD’s human resources department.
Special education and elementary education have the highest number of unfilled positions, with 140 and 350 vacancies in each area, respectively, as of Aug. 2. In other subject areas, including math, science and English at the middle and high school levels, there are fewer than 50 vacancies, Mathis-Coleman said.
That translates to one or two vacancies on average per school, Mathis-Coleman estimates. Although she isn’t alarmed by the numbers, her department hopes to reduce vacancies in the next few days by processing teacher applications already in the district’s system.
“I think a lot of times, numbers can be really scary,” Mathis-Coleman said. “It really isn’t a large number when you’re looking at our district.”
All told, CCSD had 18,778 teachers as of Oct. 1, 2018.
Unfilled teaching positions aren’t unique to Clark County. School districts nationwide have faced teacher shortages in recent years, a trend driven by low pay and overall disinvestment in public education, according to the liberal-leaning, nonprofit think tank the Economic Policy Institute and the American Federation of Teachers, a national educators’ union.
Clark County’s teacher shortage reached near-crisis levels in 2015, when the district started the school year with 881 vacancies. Vacancies sharply declined by fall 2016 to 320 when the district raised the teacher starting salary from $34,000 to $40,900, thanks to a tax increase approved by the Legislature and supported by then-Gov. Brian Sandoval.
But with the district having imposed teacher pay freezes in 2017 and 2018, it’s no surprise that vacancies have been rising steadily again, said John Vellardita, president of the Clark County Education Association. There were 413 teacher vacancies at the start of the 2017-18 school year and 545 at the same time last year.
“What we have seen since the progress from the 2015-16 school year has been an erosion of that progress,” Vellardita said.
Clark County schools struggle to compete with higher salaries, benefits and other incentives offered at school districts across the country, Vellardita said. Although the Nevada Legislature approved funding for a 3% raise and a 2% step increase for teachers this year, the measure is an incremental improvement, and the union and district leaders have not yet finalized a contract agreement that secures those increases, he added.
Superintendent Jesus Jara’s decision to reverse his plan to eliminate dean positions also affected teacher vacancies. Before the deans were reinstated, the district had 640 teacher vacancies, chief of human resources Nadine Jones said July 24.
At schools facing one or more teacher vacancies, how to fill the open positions is left to the principal, Mathis-Coleman said. It is common for principals to select long-term substitutes, who are not required to have a teaching degree and who receive a lower salary than licensed teachers.
“We have thousands of individuals in our substitute teaching pool,” Mathis-Coleman said. “They’re excited. They are also professional employees at the school district and they did receive a little onboarding training (Aug. 2).”
Nonetheless, the district’s goal is to fill vacant positions with licensed professionals as often as possible, Mathis-Coleman said. Sometimes, that can be accomplished with a long-term substitute.
“Our sub pool has individuals … who are either previous teachers, or they’re interested in being a teacher one day,” she said.
Sierra Vista High School has one teacher vacancy going into the coming school year, for a special education autism specialist, said principal John Anzalone. He hopes to fill the position with a long-term substitute teacher who has experience working with students on the autism spectrum.
“Coincidentally, we’ve been in (this) situation before, so we actually have long-term subs we feel are good fits for (this) area in the meantime,” Anzalone said.
Long-term substitutes who work with students with autism are subject to the same training requirements as other substitutes, Anzalone said. This exemplifies one way that teacher vacancies can have a particularly harmful effect on students with special needs, said Danielle Knoeppel, audiologist in CCSD’s special education division.
Knoeppel specializes in the needs of deaf children, an area that she says faces a chronic shortage of trained educators.
“Many of our classrooms have begun the year with long-term subs who really don’t have any understanding of what it means to work with a child with special needs, never mind someone who may communicate with sign language,” she said.
Even when long-term substitutes have prior experience working with students with special needs, the pressures facing substitutes placed in special education classrooms can be high and include adherence to individualized education programs for each student with special needs.
“Long-term subs, you have to feel for them. They’re still responsible for writing the IEPs, handling meetings and working with difficult parents, and they’re really not equipped to do that,” Knoeppel said.
Factors driving the special education teacher shortage — which is not unique to Las Vegas — include some of the same factors contributing to the high number of vacancies overall: Not enough new teachers coming out of the limited secondary education programs in Nevada, the high demands expected of teachers, and relatively low salaries, Knoeppel said. For special education teachers, who are increasingly responsible for more and more students across multiple CCSD schools, these problems can be even more pronounced.
“There’s high burnout, as far as I know, with special ed teachers,” Knoeppel said. “Most leave within five years, maybe another half leave within five years after that.”
Despite the growing number of teacher vacancies in Clark County, Vellardita sees some bright spots going into the school year.
For example, the district approved a pilot program in which teachers at eight struggling middle schools will receive a $10,000 boost this year, next year and the year after. Those who continue to work at the schools in 2020-21 and the following year can also receive a $5,000 annual bonus if students show performance improvements.
When it comes to attracting and retaining teachers at those low-performing schools, the program seems to be effective so far, Vellardita said.
“I can say very confidently that the program’s financial incentive to either hold on to somebody (who’s) there or attract someone to come there has been productive,” he said.
Anzalone says the process for hiring teachers can be excessively “cumbersome,” sometimes disenchanting job candidates. Nonetheless, the district has gotten better at recruiting employees, especially through social media, he said.
“The district really has done a nice job this year with trying to get the word out and marketing our schools,” Anzalone said.
While CCSD still hoped to fill some of its vacancies in the remaining days before school starts, Mathis-Coleman emphasized that hiring doesn’t end there.
“The most important thing is that I try to tell everybody to not be alarmed by the hiring dilemma,” she said. “We are constantly hiring throughout the entire year.”
