"I hear it all the time," says Lina Gutierrez, executive director of licensed personnel for CCSD. She has been with the district for three decades—half of them recruiting new teachers—and she says the current teacher vacancy rate is the highest she's ever seen.
Today, a teacher in Clark County starts out at $33,073. With what amounts to about 10 years of education (licensed professionals are required five to begin with), and just as many years in the field, the teacher can top out at $63,544 (or $81,980 with benefits included).
CCSD Superintendent Walt Rulffes, along with the state's other superintendents, has devised a multistep plan to alleviate the teacher shortage called iNVest, and in it he wrote: "Adequate compensation is a critical element in hiring teachers." But let's say we took it a step further, and as a state decided that competitive compensation is a critical element in hiring great teachers. Let's for a moment say that competitive compensation means starting teachers out at a doctor's or lawyer's pay: $100,000.
"A hundred thousand," Gutierrez laughs. "I would have a line of people waiting to teach here, all with experience."
Of course. And no longer would she only be able to harvest 500 to 600 teachers from Southern Nevada a (good) year, as she says she can now, because UNLV's college of education would overrun with ambitious students. So many, in fact, that soon enough it would have to implement standards so rigorous that only the brightest could enter, and, moreover, only the best of them would graduate. Gutierrez says competing with other states would be a challenge of the past. Until, that is, they too raised their salaries, assuaging the nationwide drought of teachers. Bruce Porter, the teacher who resigned from Sierra Vista High, says he would endure those hardships that had pushed him out for $100,000, "without a doubt in my mind."
"Oh yeah, for that much I would have stayed," says Wither, who left Coronado High for the private sector after wrestling with the decision for months. Likewise, many of the resigned teachers contacted for this story say they would have also stayed if, in fact, the current pay scale were tripled. It would in that case, according to basic calculations, demand an additional $1.6 billion a year from Legislature to the district's general fund, from which licensed personnel at this time receive $772 million. It would require the district to redistribute portions from its budget (which should not be a difficult thing to do; for we all know students learn from teachers and not new desks and fancy e-mail networks). And new taxes would be inescapable. (Who knows?—perhaps even a state income tax, the lack of which now CCSD uses as an incentive, along with a $2,000 signing bonus, to lure potential teachers from out of state.)
But, of course, we know that won't happen any time soon. "All I can tell you is that until teaching as a profession is given the respect that it deserves by the public and the politicians, it will not get the money it deserves," says Gutierrez. "With respect comes money." And further: "People just don't see teachers on the same level as they do doctors and lawyers."
They don't have to, says Wither, who taught in California for seven years before he could no longer afford to live there and so moved to Las Vegas. "I'd be back [at Coronado] in a heartbeat if they could pay just $60,000," he says.
"I bet $50,000 [as starting salary] would do it," says John Jasonek, executive director of the Clark County Education Association, which conducts several studies on the issue. "Because right now kids [in Las Vegas] can make that much without going to school."
Rulffes has said $40,000 would be a great start. "A salary commensurate to the cost of living" in Southern Nevada these days. His iNVest plan asks the Legislature for a 5 percent increase in teachers' salaries each of the next two years. There are 18,000 licensed professionals working for CCSD, and the average salary among them is $44,122.
"If I just had enough to give people a middle-class living in Las Vegas, we'd be fine," says Gutierrez. "With the average salary, you can't even purchase a home." We all know education in Clark County is in throes; that is no secret. However, says Jasonek, there has been a mixed response to that at the legislative level.
In an open letter written after Gov. Jim Gibbons' state of the state speech in January, in which the governor didn't address Clark County's threadbare per-pupil spending, nor its unattractive per-teacher spending, Rulffes articulated what we in Las Vegas have long known:
"These facts illustrate that education isn't a priority in Nevada."