EDITORIAL: Arbitration could kill hundreds of CCSD jobs

A solution to the Clark County School District's perennial licensed teacher shortage could be in place by the end of the current academic year, only it's a fix no elected official, no education leader and no taxpayer will have a say in.

Instead of filling nearly 800 teaching jobs with newly licensed educators or even long-term substitutes, those jobs, and hundreds more teaching positions in the fast-growing system, could go bye-bye.

As policymakers and school officials try to get their arms around the district's educator shortage and speed construction of a "teacher pipeline" through partnerships with colleges and streamlined training programs, the boiling labor dispute between the Clark County Education Association and the school district threatens to make much of that work moot. The union's contract with the school district expired this year, and the sides are so far apart in negotiations that the dispute could go to binding arbitration any week now.

Under a long-flawed state law the 2015 Legislature refused to scrap, public employee bargaining that reaches an impasse is decided by a single arbitrator who almost always lives outside Nevada. So an unelected individual with no stake in his decision settles matters with millions to tens of millions of tax dollars at stake. And he does so by picking one side's offer or the other, not brokering a compromise that's less extreme.

The CCEA and its members are furious that in the year that brought the state's largest tax increase in history, the school district has frozen teacher salaries. There are a number of factors behind this decision, foremost among them the school district's refusal to cut nonclassroom costs and the Legislature's funding of specific education programs, such as full-day kindergarten and English Language Learning, in a way that prevents money from being shifted to boost teacher compensation.

As reported by the Review-Journal's Neal Morton, the CCEA is demanding a contract that adds about $70 million in new compensation, including increased pension and health insurance contributions, and pay raises for years of service and continuing education. The union also wants an entirely new pay scale that starts first-year teachers at a salary (not including benefits) of $40,000 per year instead of the current $35,000, then tops out experienced teachers at $91,000 instead of the current $72,000.

The offer costs about $50 million per year more than what the school district has offered, which includes smaller pay raises and a smaller adjustment to the teacher pay scale, bumping first-year salaries to $40,000 but imposing a ceiling of about $78,000.

So when this dispute goes to arbitration — and there's no reason to believe it won't, nor is there any reason to believe either side will adjust their offers — the arbitrator, from the comfort of his couch in Colorado, Minnesota or wherever, will choose either the school district's $21 million offer or the union's $70 million offer. And if he chooses the $70 million offer, the school district will have to cut nearly $50 million in expenses to balance its budget.

If that happens, the school district could take the long-overdue step of cutting support spending by, say, eliminating the school district police department, outsourcing landscape maintenance, food service and transportation, and slashing central administration. But School Board trustees have always opposed such cost-saving measures. That leaves one option: eliminating teaching jobs, likely between 700 and 1,000 positions.

Such a move wouldn't require layoffs of licensed teachers; resignations and retirements would ensure the system still has to hire hundreds of new teachers next year. But all the unlicensed substitutes relied upon to keep the system staffed would go away (which is what the union wants) and already-large class sizes would increase.

If this all sounds familiar, it's because this exact scenario played out in 2012, when an arbitrator picked a CCEA offer of similar size to this year's demands, a package the union knew the district couldn't afford. About 1,000 teaching positions were eliminated the following school year.

It was a travesty to have someone so unaccountable to the people make such a monumental policy decision for the state. And because the Legislature decided against eliminating binding arbitration and having elected bodies settle contract disputes instead, it could happen again. It would be quite the bailout for the school district's human resources department, which this month was labeled "horrific" by State Board of Education President Elaine Wynn and has been widely panned for a teacher recruitment campaign that sold candidates on "superhero" status over a pitch that emphasized professional treatment.

This hot mess is a reminder of how far the state has to go to reform and improve its education system, which remains ruled by protectionist credentialism, collective bargaining rigged against the taxpayer and a one-size-fits-all, industrial-era salary structure with no nexus to performance. All these factors are barriers to the development and retention of excellent teachers, and they need to be addressed to head off debacles like the one that could strike next year.