The additional pay for teachers working in special education and Title I schools is coming to an end before the conclusion of the school year, according to an email sent to Clark County School District employees.
CCSD and the union, the Clark County Education Association, agreed last year to allocate a limited amount of funding to giving raises to those educators. Starting July 2024, all licensed employees working in special education or Title I schools with a 5 percent or more vacancy rate received an additional $5,000 spread over 24 pay periods in a pro-rated amount. It was set to end when the money ran out.
Under a year later, that ending has arrived. On Friday, employees received an email that the money would be coming to an end in March and April, depending on different employee groups. That means that employees will not receive the full $5,000.
“It’s not a good story in the sense that we weren’t able to fulfill the full year, but it’s a good story because the money accomplished what it was intended to do, and that was to pay additional money for teachers to stay or to go into these high vacancies,” John Vellardita, executive director of CCEA, said.
Teacher vacancies are far higher among Title I schools, which are low-income schools that receive federal funding. The stipend helped encourage teachers to take jobs at those schools to receive extra money, and it reduced vacancy rates. But without that extra money, Vellardita and Vicki Kreidel, president of the National Education Association of Southern Nevada, said it is unlikely teachers will continue to stay in those roles.
Reducing vacancy rates
Of the school district’s 700 teacher vacancies, 570 are in Title I schools, Interim Superintendent Brenda Larsen Mitchell told the State Board of Education in January.
Vellardita said the stipend had positive results in reducing vacancies. There was a 53 percent reduction in vacancies in Title I schools and 26 percent reduction in special education when the school year started in August, Vellardita said.
Kreidel agreed that it had helped, as people had specifically sought out teaching at Title I schools because they needed the extra money.
Principal Sarah Popek said that the stipend did not affect vacancy rates at Tate Elementary School, which is Title I.
“Tate has consistently had low vacancy rates over the last several years because of our positive school climate,” she wrote in a message. “The stipend made no impact and, in fact, we will have fewer vacancies next year despite the discontinuation of the stipend.”
Need for a long-term solution
Kreidel said that it was always clear the stipend was coming to an end, but she was still hearing from some teachers who had come to depend on the money.
“Since this contract was negotiated, the economy has gotten even worse here in Las Vegas,” she said. “People are frustrated with money that’s a stipend or a bonus or one-time money. They just want to be paid more money in general.”
Originally, CCEA had projected that 9,000 people would be eligible for the Title I funding, but 11,000 people ended up being eligible, Vellardita said. For special education, the union projected 3,000, but there were 3,500 people who were eligible.
He said that CCEA is supporting a bill in the Legislature that will be introduced this week that will earmark money for the type of vacancy issues this stipend aimed to solve.
“We feel very confident that we’re going to get continued funding on this,” he said.
Kreidel said she worries that any bill passed would be too late for the upcoming year; people are already interviewing for next year’s jobs. She emphasized the need for a long-term solution. She said people would leave jobs in Title I schools, which typically requires more work from teachers, without an extra stipend.
“Temporarily, some of these Title I positions might get filled, but as soon as the money’s gone, people are going to go elsewhere, because there’s plenty of jobs in Clark County, there’s plenty of openings,” Kreidel said.
What educators wanted, she said, was permanent higher pay.
“What educators are telling me is we don’t want one-time funding that we have to then figure out a way to get another bill through to extend the funding. We want a permanent raise and pay for Title I schools and SpEd teachers so that they make more money, because those positions are really important, and we need to make sure we fill as many of them as we can,” Kreidel said.
Contact Katie Futterman at kfutterman@reviewjournal.com. Follow @ktfutts on X and @katiefutterman.bsky.social.
