Month: March 2017

Although Metro Police plan to hire hundreds of new officers in the coming months, the Clark County School District won’t be getting any of the officers being paid for by the More Cops Tax.

The school district police department could use some help keeping the more than 320,000 students safe who are attending 356 valley campuses.

“Across the country crime is increasing and we are experiencing that as well,” said CCSD Police Capt. Ken Young.

According to Young, already this year, school police have confiscated 22 firearms which is nearly double the amount of guns recovered the entire previous school year.

Under its current budget, CCSD Police can have up to 161 officers on board. Currently, there are 157. The department is looking to hire some officers with experience.

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Guess what? The Raiders are coming to Las Vegas, and there’s nothing I can do about. Personally, I don’t care if there is football in Las Vegas, and likely I will buy tickets and go to the games. However, that’s not why I created this page, in order to prevent football from being in Las Vegas.

I don’t actually hate the raiders, just getting your attention.

I want to use the Raiders and the domains to bring attention to our failing horribly underfunded schools. Every year Las Vegas waits to see the rankings, to see if we are the second, third or dead last school district in the nation. For whatever reason, tax payers are unable to consider the option that we need better schools, so they are willing to spend $1 billion for football welfare and helping billionaires out, than forking up a few million more to make our schools better.

My kid went to private school his entire life: until I realized his socialization was failing by only being around the kids of parents who could afford the school. Now he’s in public school and frankly, despite his teacher being amazing, I consider leaving the public school system all the time.

His principal seems to not really care about the students, and has even gone as far to refuse to meet me to discuss things.

My complaints have been ignored, my letters thrown away and the one time I went in to try to “get something done” I was kicked out of the office for videotaping (legally) to document my complaint. Even when CCSD police verified what I was doing was legal, they refused to let me video tape. Why? Because administrators just don’t care…

Everyone I know has recommended me suing the district for the stuff I’ve witnessed, and the utter idiocy I’ve experienced. From downright bigotry to ignorance, some of the administration seems intent on not working hard. However, suing the district and taking more money from the students isn’t something I would look forward to, even though I have some of the best attorneys.

Instead, I’m using the raiders, and their corporate football welfare to get attention in hope that maybe we can actually have a discussion on what is going on, and how can fix it.

I get it: it’s a hard, hard job. However, as long as we underfund CCSD, we will be creating an environment that makes it really hard for students to excel. Also, as long as we are willing to continue to accept excuses for bad administrators and staff that don’t really care, nothing will change.

Love some feedback and ideas,

Pesach “Pace” Lattin
me@pacevegas.com

In case you missed it, we have a bad teacher shortage here in Nevada. Hundreds of full-time positions go unfilled each year, forcing school districts to hire often underprepared long-term substitutes to fill the void. The disadvantage this forces on kids, who need stability and high-quality instruction for the best learning outcomes, is incalculable. With $750 million, you could hire 750 new teachers every year for a decade (assuming the combined individual salary and benefits didn’t exceed the current max of $100,000). To put that in perspective, the teacher shortage was around 900 empty positions at its height.

Overcrowding and aging infrastructure, combined with a historically underfunded school district, have ravaged public schools in Clark County. In some of the rapidly growing parts of the valley, such as Mountain’s Edge, kids can go through entire grades in cramped portable classrooms. In the inner city, the oldest schools struggle every day with basic infrastructure, such as broken air conditioners, which force teachers to cancel classes. If you applied the $750 million to fixing existing schools, you could repair every piece of equipment in CCSD marked for replacement (the district’s repair list tallied around $550 million earlier this year) and still have enough money to build six top-of-the-line elementary schools to ease overcrowding (the most expensive new schools cost around $30 million). The remaining $15 million could be spent on other essentials (or maybe nine $5 servings of ice cream for all 320,000 kids in the district).

Excerpt from The Vegas Sun