Court To CCSD: You Can’t Stop Teachers Union
The teachers union just took the CCSD to school.
The slap fight between educators and the district turned into a “SLAPP” fight in court on Tuesday. A judge denied Clark County School District’s lawsuit halt any upcoming “work actions” by the Clark County Education Association (a.k.a. the teachers union).
If you haven’t been following what’s been going on, we’ll explain.
What is going on between CCSD and the teachers union?
The Clark County Education Association (CCEA) and Clark County School District (CCSD) have been locking horns over the terms of their next contract. This would serve for the 2024-25 school year and beyond. CCEA is asking for a 10 percent raise year one, and an 8 percent raise year two, along with other asks. Big raises, surely. But when you consider the starting salary for a teacher in the city is around $50,000, you can see there is some making up to do. (Los Angeles Unified School District teachers start at nearly $62,000.)
Clark County School District is unwilling to give such a steep raise. They instead offer an 8.5 percent year one increase and 2 percent year two. This pales in comparison to the 10%/2% raise given to administrators and 8.65%/2% raise for support staff in new agreements. The teachers union says not only is the offer of 8.5 percent year one falling short, it’s also a fallacy. During this school year, salaries actually decreased by 1.875% according to the union. That would make the year one increase a much smaller 6.6 percent.
So at a CCEA meeting on July 29th at the Rio, union members said they would have potential “work actions” if a new deal wasn’t penned by August 26th. Two days later, CCSD filed a lawsuit to stop any work actions. Turns out it is illegal for public employees to strike in Nevada. Of course, CCEA didn’t say they would strike, but CCSD felt that was veiled language.
CCEA then countered with an anti-SLAPP lawsuit. SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” so an anti-SLAPP suit is to counter that. The judge agreed that the lawsuit was attempting to single out acts of free speech in its lawsuit, and therefore it was thrown out.
So… can my kids go to school or what?
Well… we don’t know. August 26th is this Saturday and while we’d like to hope a deal will be struck by then, we aren’t sure. All we know is Clark County School District has a staffing problem, we have more students per teacher than any other state in the country and the cost of an education degree isn’t getting any cheaper.
