CCSD wants more teachers: ‘Starting salary of $54K is very competitive’

The Clark County School District is launching a recruitment campaign that will primarily target teachers in California with digital video ads aimed at attracting them to the relatively more affordable Silver State, officials said Tuesday.

The district ideally would be able to hire about 1,400 new teachers by the start of the next school year in the fall, said Tod Story, the district’s chief communications officer, after district leaders held a news conference in the Aggie Roberts Elementary School library in Henderson.

“We think within the Western states, our starting salary of $54,000 is very competitive for teachers around the region,” Story said.

That starting pay is for new teachers just out of school, Story said, adding that teachers with more experience and education would earn a higher starting salary.

“Based on their education and experience, they would start somewhere else on the salary scale commensurate with where they’re qualified,” Story said.

CCSD’s campaign, titled, “We are Vegas. We are CCSD,” will target Southern California with videos that portray the Las Vegas area not just as a bustling tourist destination but also a great place to live and work.

“We’re the gateway to Southern Nevada, an affordable place to live and play,” says the narrator in one of the videos.

District officials, including interim Superintendent Brenda Larsen-Mitchell, spoke to reporters in an elementary school library filled with fourth graders — they were excited to see their school featured in the new videos — about the new hiring effort.

Larsen-Mitchell, whom Clark County School Board trustees named interim superintendent after former Superintendent Jesus Jara resigned this year, told the kids they are “the center of everything we do” and also said she has worked in the school district since 1994, “which was the last year the district was fully staffed.”

“We must strategically implement recruitment and retention efforts to ensure we have the very, very best candidates for our students,” Larsen-Mitchell said.

Also, Story said, because school districts in California are laying off teachers, CCSD is hoping some of those educators will consider Southern Nevada as a new place to put down roots.

According to EdSource, a California education news organization, 100 of California’s 1,000 school districts have issued layoff notices to 1,900 teachers this school year.

Teacher layoffs, and possible layoffs, by California school districts this year have been widely reported by news outlets in the state.

“So we want to attract those candidates who may be looking for new opportunities if they are one of those unfortunate layoffs,” Story said.

In April, School Board trustees voted to seek to offer vacant teaching jobs to qualified retirees if the district can show that it has exhausted efforts to recruit nonretirees, according to board documents.

In February, the Review-Journal reported, the U.S. and Nevada education departments were probing the district’s use of federal pandemic aid to send groups of staff to beach destinations for teacher recruitment.

Contact Brett Clarkson at bclarkson@reviewjournal.com.