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Breaking systems, harming families
Last month, I read with awe the incredible Caitlin Dickerson story in The Atlantic. The piece delved into what really happened with Trump’s family separation border policy in 2018. The piece is long and sprawling and presents a lot of details about ICE and the Dept. of Justice, leaders of Homeland Security, folks in the […]
The CCSD shell game (which they are really bad at playing)
Step right up, hims and hers and theys and thems, to the greatest game in the world. The object of this game is to follow this kernel of truth, which I am putting under one of these three shells. Note the shell that truth is under, and keep track of it as I move the […]
Jara, board attorney moving closer to settlement on ‘hostile work environment’
The $2.6 million that Supt. Jesus Jara was demanding is off the table, with CCSD Board of Trustees moving to agree to pay attorneys fees and play nice with Jara for the rest of his contract. How long the rest of his contract will run is still up in the air, yet a letter from […]
Jara still asking for millions as voters decide on his future
The CCSD Board of Trustees is still negotiating with Supt. Jesus Jara about compensation for his alleged “harassment and retaliation” at the hands of Trustees Danielle Ford, Linda Cavazos and Lisa Guzman when they voted to fire him last October. Remarkably, the majority of trustees seem willing to at least hear him out, if not […]
For CCEA, Democrats are bad because they’re Republicans, but Republicans are good
The nastiness has begun. Just days after heralding in the merry month of May, and the last cool days we in Southern Nevada will experience for the next four months, voters started getting flyers in their mailboxes. Nasty flyers. Untrue flyers. Political flyers. Sent by a group called Strategic Horizons. Which is related to and […]
The accidental superintendent: How Jara was hired, and how he might be getting a contract renewal
This week, with the latest list of licensed personnel separations revealing 148 more teachers heading out the door, Data Insight Partners came out with a damning series of data sets that show how many teachers are leaving CCSD, and how many are expected to leave by August. “It’s bad, and we are in uncharted territory,” […]
We missed our chance to pay attention to our children
In early 2021, when Supt. Jesus Jara announced, without consulting principals, that all students would be going back to school in a hybrid model, many teachers and building leaders let it be known that “business as usual” wasn’t going to cut it. Whenever a traumatic event happens in a school, they pointed out, leaders bring […]
CCSD needs meaningful change in wake of brutal attack
This is what we know. A 26-year-old, second year teacher at Eldorado High School opened the door for one of her students at the end of the school day on Thursday, April 7. Jonathan Eluterio Martinez Garcia, 16, said he wanted to know about missing assignments. The teacher walked to her desk and sat down […]
State Board of Ed threatens CCSD with receivership: What might that mean?
On March 14 the AB469 subcommittee for the Nevada State Board of Education met to discuss the authority the state has to put the Clark County School District into receivership for not implementing the reorganization law, which was passed in 2017. There’s been a lot of speculation on what this means. The district, of course, […]
Who ya gonna call? Gate Busters!
The ghost of Emily Litella inhabited the CCSD boardroom last Thursday during a meeting whose main agenda was supposed to be about how to address escalating school violence. Instead, most commenters pointed to an item Supt. Jesus Jara and his team seemingly snuck into the consent agenda that would, on the surface, fund police officers […]
Party like it’s 1994
Supt. Jesus Jara demonstrated my favorite word again at the CCSD Trustees meeting last week when he tried to argue that it wasn’t his fault so many teachers are leaving the district. At the beginning of the discussion about his performance evaluation, he noted, “the last time the Clark County School District opened fully staffed […]
Firing Jara was Cepeda’s idea, say two trustees
On October 6, 2021, the Board of Trustees for the Clark County School District were told after their work session that they needed to go into a closed meeting. None of them were aware of what the closed meeting was about and, by all accounts, were pretty shell-shocked when chief negotiator Fikisha Miller walked in […]