Hundreds of thousands of students will end their summer breaks and head to classrooms on Monday as the 2026-27 school year begins in the Clark County School District.
The nation’s fifth largest school district is entering 2026-27 with nearly 99 percent of employee positions filled, creating the smallest employee vacancy rate in years, according to district data shared Friday. Only 170 classroom teacher vacancies exist as of Wednesday. The district said it expects some vacancies at the start of the school year.
As school starts, here are five topics to keep an eye on in the upcoming year:
School facility plan on the way
With its listening tour complete, district leaders are poised to present a multibillion dollar Facility Master Plan to the Clark County School Board this fall.
The plan has the potential to drastically change school buildings around the valley over the next decade, with ideas that include opening new pre-K through eighth grade schools and closing and rezoning select elementary and middle schools.
School closures are listed as an option only in circumstances where students could be rezoned to attend a higher quality school building, district Chief of Facilities Brandon McLaughlin previously told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“If I’m a student and I’m at a really horrible school — the AC goes out intermittently, the lights aren’t reliable — I would hate to have to travel further to go to just as bad of a school,” McLaughlin said earlier this year. “We’re not looking at any school consolidations or closures where students go to worse solutions.”
The School Board will have the final say this fall on whether the plan’s proposals become reality.
How will enrollment fare?
The district tallied just 291,587 students in the district last school year, the fewest since the 2005-06 school year, according to Nevada Department of Education data.
Enrollment decline is expected to continue this year and create a ripple effect on school budgets, as student count is directly tied to district funding.
Projections estimate a loss of 25,000 students over the next five years, Rick Baldwin, the district’s director of comprehensive planning, said earlier this year. Losses of that size could decrease the district’s budget by nearly a quarter-billion dollars if the per-pupil rate funded by the state does not change.
Students won’t be officially counted until later this fall, but those tallies will have near-immediate effects on school budgets.
Academic gains
State data that will be released later this fall will show whether academic improvements continued in 2025-26, which was Superintendent Jhone Ebert’s first full year in the head role.
Students across all grade levels made modest gains in math and English Language Arts in the 2024-25 school year. Still, more than half of all students were not proficient in those two core subjects, and Clark County schools remained between two to four points behind pre-pandemic subject proficiency at nearly all grade levels.
The district enters its first year of a new five-year strategic plan targeted at improving student outcomes.
Academically, the plan aims for K-3 literacy rates to increase by 60 percent, and grades 3-8 math and literacy rates to increase by 50 percent by 2031. In the 2024-25 school year, math and literacy rates in grades 3-8 were 33 percent and 43.9 percent, respectively, according to Nevada Department of Education data.
“This plan is absolutely achievable by all of us working together and being transparent on where we’re at,” Ebert said of the strategic plan in May.
School zone traffic safety improvements
A range of traffic safety ideas may make their way onto roads and into classrooms this school year following a particularly dangerous year for student pedestrians.
Vehicles struck 427 students last school year, a 356 percent increase in collisions from the year prior. Four of the students hit by vehicles died due to the collisions. A School Traffic Safety Working Group developed 75 recommendations in a report to curb the collisions.
Nineteen of those recommendations are listed as short-term, meaning they can be accomplished in the next two years. Among them are suggestions to provide families with maps showing safe walking or biking routes, increase law enforcement presence around schools during pick-up and drop-off times and install better signage near frequently used school crosswalks.
Several municipalities and community partners have joined the district’s push to improve school zone traffic safety, and this school year will show whether these new strategies can put a dent in the number of student pedestrian collisions.
Upcoming legislative session
Both district and Clark County Education Association teachers union leaders are already gearing up for the 2027 Nevada Legislature’s start in February.
Specific policy priorities are still in the works, but a new pilot program revealed some areas where both the district and union will seek legislative action. These include an expansion of longer school days, full-day pre-K programs, targeted literacy and math tutoring, and teacher professional development strategies currently being tested across 18 struggling schools.
“Our goal is to show progress and that children are achieving, and ultimately take this information to bring that up to the legislative session to show these are the gains we’re making, and this is how we need to secure more funding to improve this and really expand it across the district,” Kristan Nigro, the union’s president, told the Review-Journal on Thursday.
Though the district will adopt its legislative platform in December, trustees have already identified several legislative priorities at meetings this year. These priorities include funding for special education, pre-K and transportation for open enrollment students, among other items.
Contact Spencer Levering at slevering@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0253.
