Hire Teachers Instead of Football Players #ccsd

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