EDITORIAL: Reinstate hiring bonuses to attract new teachers

Nevada will need thousands of new schoolteachers over the next few years. If Gov. Brian Sandoval and state legislators expand pre-kindergarten and full-day kindergarten programs, and reduce class sizes in elementary grades, Nevada will need thousands more new teachers to staff those new classrooms.

Creating new teaching positions will put additional pressure on school districts that already struggle to fill educator vacancies every year. The Clark County School District, for example, still has hundreds of teaching positions open for the current school year. Every year, the school district hires long-term substitutes as placeholders for those jobs.

In August, the School Board declared a labor shortage and hired more than 200 retired teachers into high-needs positions such as math, science and special education, allowing those teachers to collect salaries on top of their pensions. And it still wasn’t enough to put a licensed teacher in every classroom in Southern Nevada.

Gov. Sandoval will unveil his budget and his legislative agenda in Thursday’s State of the State address. If, as expected, he proposes bolstering underperforming K-12 systems with new teaching positions, he’ll need to include a plan to help school districts attract applicants for those jobs. That plan should include the sixth of the Review-Journal’s 25 recommendations to lawmakers in 25 days: the reinstatement of hiring bonuses for new Nevada teachers.

Education officials say Nevada struggles to hire new teachers because its salaries aren’t competitive with those of other states. A first-year Clark County School District teacher with a bachelor’s degree is paid almost $35,000 per year in base salary, close to the national average for rookie educators. The system covers about $16,000 in benefits and tax payments as well. (Nevada public employees do not pay Social Security withholding.) By their sixth year, Clark County teachers with bachelor’s degrees are paid about $41,300 per year. A first-year Clark County teacher with a master’s degree is paid about $40,300, a figure that rises to more than $53,300 in the 10th year.

Increasing teacher salaries is an expensive proposition. Boosting first-year pay would increase pressure on lawmakers to lift the entire scale — at a cost of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in Clark County alone — giving all teachers a pay raise regardless of their performance. Such a step would deliver no return on investment.

We’d like to see Nevada move away from a rigid, one-size-fits-all salary structure — regardless of a teacher’s life and work experience — in favor of performance-based pay. And the state needs to do more to transition educated professionals into teaching careers through alternative, less bureaucratic licensing requirements.

But until those steps are accomplished, school districts could use extra hiring incentives to provide students with the best teachers possible. Between 2001 and 2007, the state awarded new teachers hiring bonuses of between $2,000 and $2,500. Those bonuses helped Clark County staff record enrollment growth. Now, amid a recovering economy, enrollment growth is back. Offering those bonuses again, or offering even larger ones, would spare systems from the cost of giving all teachers raises while making Nevada teaching jobs more attractive regionally. Some of the money would need to be deferred to ensure teachers stay on the job a year or two, but it’s still cash.

Hiring bonuses worked before. They’ll work again.