(Illustration: Carrie Kaufman; Adobe Stock image)
One of the most contentious bills in Carson City right now, some 20 days from the end of session, is AB175 – appointing four members to the Clark County School District Board of Trustees.
Those four members would be chosen by the Clark County Commission and the three largest cities in the county – which are Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Henderson.
According to the bill, none of the four members will be able to vote on decisions cast at regular board meetings. But they can vote for officers of the board, and they can even run for those offices themselves. They can also vote on board policies – which are typically hashed out in monthly public work sessions.
That’s an important point, because policy is where the board dysfunction lies. Sadly, the only person who pointed that out in a May 8 Senate hearing on the bill was Clark County Education Association vice-president Jim Frazee, speaking by phone in public comment at the end.
“I believe every school board trustee that I’ve met started with the best intentions,” Frazee said. “Then they run into the governance model that we currently have and they get lost in the dysfunction.”
Legislators, though, seem wholly unaware of the dysfunction and the “boring” governance model that is causing it. Sens. Dina Neal and Edgar Flores asked hard questions about democracy and how appointing four members would or wouldn’t undermine that fragile idea.
Assembly members, and the bill’s co-sponsors, Toby Yurek and Shannon Bilbray-Axelrod talked about the need for expertise – which appointed members might bring.
“Is this perfect?” asked Bilbray-Axelrod. “Probably not… but at least we’re moving the needle.”
I’m gonna run with that metaphor for a minute. Yes, you want to move the needle on the school board’s speedometer, which is currently stuck. But you have to understand that the reason the vehicle is not moving is because its engine has been blown out. You can put more people in the car, but as long as you ignore the fact that you have to rebuild or buy a new engine, you aren’t going anywhere.
What we have with the current board are a couple of people who deny that there is an engine problem, or the idea that you would want to drive anywhere else in the first place.
As far as I’m concerned, AB175 can pass or not pass – it’s not going to make a difference. Because it doesn’t address the root causes of the Clark County School Board’s dysfunction – dysfunction the legislators don’t seem to understand.
Bilbray-Axelrod tried to assure the Senate Education Committee on May 8 that plenty of subject matter experts are “chomping at the bit to share their expertise.”
But that’s not how it works. CCSD Trustees have made clear they cannot make any operational decisions. They aren’t even able to ask for reports on their own. They only can use what staff and the superintendent give them.
Henderson Government Affairs Director Nicole Rourke – who held the same position for CCSD when Jara first started – told Senators that CCSD is also less than transparent with municipalities.
“Frankly, we’ve had real difficulty getting the kind of data and accountability that we’ve requested,” Rourke said. “We’ve gone to the district on numerous occasions, we’ve asked for different data points and we’ve gotten a lot of pushback and basically been told ‘you’re getting the information we’re willing to give you.’”
That wouldn’t change if municipalities appointed four more board members. If, say, Henderson appointed a CPA steeped in public accounting to the board, and that CPA noticed that trustees weren’t getting a certain report, that CPA couldn’t ask for that report.
The CPA can only ask the superintendent. Or that’s how it used to be. After a set of policy rewrites headed up by Lola Brooks in 2021, trustees can now only ask the superintendent’s liaison – who is currently Joe Caruso. You remember, the guy who got into the car accident that Supt. Jara ran away from.
Let me say this again: The trustees cannot ask staff for the materials they need to do district oversight or manage the superintendent. And now, they can’t even ask the superintendent directly.
Moreover, it is entirely the purview of the superintendent to decide if the trustees get what they ask for.
Just for fun, let’s think about the information a trustee might want. Say, for instance, they watch their superintendent lie to the legislature about a bill he drafted – and he is called out for lying by the Speaker of the Assembly and the Governor and the State Superintendent. And let’s say the trustees wanted to see what communications the superintendent had in drafting the bill. The trustees would have to ask the liaison to ask the superintendent if they could please have that info.
“Pretty please? With a cherry on top?”
Let’s say, just for fun, that one trustee noticed a clause in an updated policy… perhaps the phrase “at the discretion of the superintendent” and one of those appointed members – or perhaps a smart elected member – says, “Hey, why is that clause in there? I’ve never seen that clause in any other policy update?” And then that trustee is told it’s nothing, don’t worry your pretty little head about it. And then a few months later, the superintendent gives his entire cabinet raises totaling over $400,000 annually and cites as his authority for doing so the phrase “at the discretion of the superintendent” in the updated policy.
That couldn’t possibly happen, though, right?
Sen. Neal noted that AB175 doesn’t have any criteria for trustees to focus on students and staff. And she picked up one of the Nevada State Education Associaton’s ideas to have a teacher be part of the board.
“Teachers – who teach at at-risk schools… should have more of a say about what should happen at the district level and can provide more of an expertise than what is currently on the board… I think there is value in placing that human being on that board,” Neal said. “They’re going to be able to hone in and dial down and say, actually this is the wrong direction.”
No they are not. Because board policy says they are not allowed to bring in any piece of information the superintendent doesn’t bring in or direct his staff to bring in. Including their own experience. And any teacher that would put themselves in that position would be committing career suicide.
The motto of this school district is basically: Retaliation now! Retaliation forever!
Which is why Sen. Flores’ suggestion that the bill might be too harsh on the CCSD board was beyond laughable.
“My understanding is the board could, if they wanted to, now, set up subcommittees and citizen advisory committees. So through my lens looking out… if I’m sitting here and I believe that we need some support in that we can get some folk from business and industry… and allow them to make up some type of advisory role to us. And that I see that relationship kind of working in unison. ‘We believe that we don’t have the expertise and we want you to help.’”
Sen. Flores… I know you gave a caveat that you weren’t speaking from a lens of expertise, but… The CCSD Board of Trustees won’t ask for help. Let’s go back to the car metaphor. There are at least two trustees who refuse to admit the engine is broken, and have instead changed the rules to argue that the car is not supposed to move. And they control the board with said retaliatory tactics.
My proposal
So, here is my proposal. Change AB175 so the legislature, not municipalities, appoints four board members. They are not to have a vote on anything – even policy or board officers. But they are required to attend all meetings – even closed-door sessions and those small group meetings Jara has with trustees that skirt open meeting law. They are also allowed to participate in any and all discussions. They just can’t vote.
These appointed members – let’s call them a legislative task force – should be tasked with listening to closed sessions from early 2020 onward. Trustee Linda Cavazos has accused Trustee Lola Brooks of bullying her during closed sessions. I have heard accounts from and about other trustees’ behavior when they’re not in public. Those appointed board members should be able to go back and see if that’s true.
The task force appointed members have to be tough, not afraid to square off with people intent on gaslighting them.
There are a handful of people who would fit that bill in this state, but I propose these people:
- Sen. Dina Neal
- Sen. Edgar Flores
- Assemblywoman Shannon Bilbray-Axelrod
- Assemblyman Toby Yurek
They should embed themselves in CCSD’s board for a year. Then they can come back to Carson City in 2025 with a clearer understanding of why the CCSD board is so dysfunctional. And they can create legislation that will actually address the problem.
I seriously doubt that this will happen. The joint committee on education from the Senate and Assembly held a series of meetings over the past year and a half where people said what they could say in public. The committee members did not, to my knowledge, hold private, off-the-record, one-on-one meetings with principals and teachers in their districts. They did not talk to trustees – though a couple did give public testimony. They did not seek out candid conversations with current and former admin, or the two consultant groups that threw themselves against the wall within the last two years. This is truly the only way to understand what is going on in CCSD – to be inside it, or to talk honestly with people who are.
Then, once that engine is fixed, we can talk about the direction we want to drive in.