How CCSD stacks up: 1st-year teachers*
New York City: $61,100 Los Angeles: $56,100 Chicago: $57,900 Miami-Dade: $47,700 CCSD: $50,100 (formerly $43,000) Broward (Fla.): $47,500 Houston: $56,900 Hillsborough (Fla.) : $47,500 Orange (Fla.): $47,500 Palm Beach (Fla.): $47,500 *No prior teaching experience, bachelor’s degree only. Rounded to the nearest $100.
Clark County School District is raising its starting teacher pay by $7,000 a year — a 16% raise — and giving current teachers a $5,000 bonus, district officials announced today.
Currently, a first-year CCSD teacher with only a bachelor’s degree and no prior teaching experience makes $43,011 a year. The new starting salary — effective next school year, pending final approval by the school board — will be $50,115, Superintendent Jesus Jara said at a press conference at Desert Pines High School.
“That puts us above a lot of districts in the West Coast,” said Jara, who clarified the bump will also mean a raise for current teachers making less than $50,000. “We have to be competitive in really providing our teachers the compensation that they deserve and for us to be able to compete, because our kids deserve the opportunity to have a highly qualified, well-compensated educator.”
Until today’s announcement, CCSD had the lowest starting pay of the nation’s 10 largest school districts. By enrollment, CCSD is the fifth-largest school district in the country and the second-largest in the West.
The district has not raised new-teacher pay since 2015.
By comparison, a first-year teacher in Miami-Dade County, the fourth-largest school district, earns $47,700. A teacher in Broward County, Florida — the Fort Lauderdale area — makes $47,500. And in the Washoe County School District, Nevada’s second-largest school system, a first-year teacher makes about $40,700.
Kristan Nigro, a kindergarten teacher at Schorr Elementary School, said raising beginner teacher pay will go a long way in the face of inflation and ballooning housing costs.
“We have over 300,000 students here in Clark, and every single one of them is deserving of a solid educator,” she said. “I really feel that this package that we have is going to take us there.”
Additionally, current teachers, district police officers and administrators will get a $5,000 retention bonus. Support staffers will get $4,500, plus a larger employer contribution to their health care plans. Jara said the total “investment” comes to about $165 million, funded by regular operating and pandemic relief dollars.
This round of bonuses and raises comes on the heels of several other incentives: $4,000 relocation bonuses for new teacher hires coming from at least 100 miles away or out of state; bus driver raises of more than 40%, from about $15-$20 an hour to about $22-$29, plus hiring, retention and referral bonuses for transportation workers; up to $2,000 in bonuses for all full-time employees who worked during the coronavirus pandemic; and making any 11-month principal contracts 12-month pay.
Jara said CCSD has not been fully staffed since 1994, and the district would not end evaluating employee pay with this round of raises and bonuses.
As of this afternoon, the CCSD human resources website had about 1,500 teacher vacancies posted.
At Desert Pines, alone, the posted number of teacher vacancies was 16.
Isaac Stein, Desert Pines’ principal, said this salary adjustment lets the district recruit the best.
“This may be that effort to get us over the hump,” he said.
The School Board is expected to give final approval to the salary adjustments when it meets on June 9.
School Board President Irene Cepeda, though, was clearly supportive today.
“We are listening,” she said. “We hear folks, and I think more than anything we really want to acknowledge all the amazing hard work that has been put in this last academic year and beyond. We recognize how difficult this last year was.”