EDITORIAL: To cover teachers’ new contract, School Board must rethink entire system

An awful lot of Clark County School District teachers deserve a pay raise. A great many of them deserve a really big raise.

Do all teachers deserve a pay raise? Of course not. It's bad policy and the state can't afford it.

But for all the reformed practices adopted or under development in Nevada's public education system — from output-based evaluations to better teacher training to accountability measures that finally make it possible to fire underperforming educators — our school districts just can't break away from salary scales based on seniority, credentialism and egalitarianism.

Clark County Education Association members on Saturday ratified a two-year contract that gives every local teacher a pay bump. Under the terms of the contract, which must be approved by the School Board on Jan. 14 to take effect, the starting salary for first-year teachers rises from $34,600 to $40,000, and the maximum teacher salary rises from $73,700 to $89,000. Teachers also will receive a $900 "cost-of-living" bonus at the start of the 2016-17 school year.

The contract includes incentives for teachers who work at historically underperforming schools — a positive development that rewards educators for taking on a more challenging assignment. But the scale's requirement that teachers continue to complete training and advanced studies outside the classroom to receive more raises remains disconnected from the job that teachers do inside the classroom — the ultimate measure of whether they're effective.

The total cost of the contract is $108 million in additional obligations to the school district over the next two years, or about $70 million more than what the school district was offering throughout negotiations. The money has to come from somewhere, and there could be even less of it to go around once the school district's other bargaining groups point to the teachers' deal in negotiating their own contracts. Those unions will want similar increases to their own pay.

The School Board will have to make a great many difficult decisions to cover the costs of the teachers' contract. But they can't be irresponsible. They'll be tempted to further slash building maintenance and other expenses that will add costs down the line. They need to rethink the entire system. Trustees can start by paring back central administration, eliminating the district's police force and outsourcing school district landscape maintenance.