Nevada already has the smallest teacher-to-student ratio in the country, with an average of 43 teachers per 1,000 students.
And there is no end in sight to the teacher shortage.
Currently, there are more than 1,300 teachers needed in the Clark County School District, so why is it so hard to keep teachers working?
Well, the pay doesn’t help. The average teacher’s salary in the state is about 57,000, and with negotiations between the Clark County School District and the teachers’ union stuck in arbitration, it’s unlikely teachers in the country's fifth largest school district are going to see a raise before the end of the year.
Teachers are concerned about ever-increasing workload, scrutiny, bureaucracy -- and safety, especially since the Pandemic. The recent death of a 17-year-old student beaten to death by his Rancho High classmates hasn’t left the headlines.
So, who WANTS to be a teacher?
It’s a difficult question for even long-time educators such as state Assemblywoman Natha Anderson of Sparks to answer. She told KNPR’s state of Nevada that there are a number of issues plaguing the profession, but the biggest problem is large class sizes.
She told KNPR’s State of Nevada that connecting with students is becoming increasingly difficult.
“It's not just about what we're teaching them from the standards,” she said. “It's the essential skills of how to work with each other, how to listen with each other, and how to engage... It's okay to disagree with each other, we need to, but we need to do so in a way that we can actually discuss the issues. With that many students in a class, how can you do that?”
Teachers in Nevada have long decried large class sizes as one of the biggest challenges facing the state’s education system. It’s a problem only exacerbated by the pandemic according to Ignacio Prado, executive director of Futuro Academy in Las Vegas.
When teachers at his school began to show signs of burnout, he worked with educators and families to find a way to improve his staff’s morale, eventually moving the school to a four-day work week.
“We couldn't really do anything in the short-term in terms of compensating teachers for the additional demands. “What we could do is try and carve out things... time in their schedule to give them the gift of more work-life balance, which is something that we felt teachers were asking for.”
Despite efforts to create more balance for teachers, more than 44% of teachers leave their profession in the first five years.
According to Prado, developing teachers also require more one-on-one support from mentors and administrators. In his experience, teachers just starting out often forget that students can't learn everything overnight.
“My first priority is helping them break things into little steps and pieces, managing their expectations, managing their mental health and well-being as they're traversing the first few years of teaching where you're putting all the pieces together for yourself and being kind with yourself. I think a lot more people stick with it if they were getting a lot more of that support.”
Schools are also facing more competition from the private sector. Students considering teaching are now more easily able to compare careers in other industries.
According to Parker, most who think about working in education are not expecting to become rich. However, he believes the negatives are beginning to outweigh the positives.
“They want to make an impact with kids, but right now, it's so hard to make an impact because we expect so much of teachers,” he said. “It's not just about the academics. It's about the social-emotional issues. It's about safety. It's about everything surrounding education and education itself.”
Parker believes the struggle to recruit and retain teachers is emblematic of a larger debate about the role of education in society. For him, it’s a debate centered around the value of educators.
“They don't go into it thinking it's going to be easy,” Parker continued, “but it can't be so difficult that it burns them out in a few years, we have to think about these broader issues and make the teaching profession something that is sustainable.”
Guests: Sean Parker, executive director, Teach for America, Nevada; Ignacio Prado, founder and executive director, Futuro Academy; Natha Anderson (D - Sparks), teacher and state Assemblywoman
