Audit: CCSD teacher recruitment trips wasted taxpayer money

Audit: CCSD teacher recruitment trips wasted taxpayer money The Clark County School District lacked a formal, broad program for recruiting teachers while numerous staff members traveled to Miami and Honolulu for extended stays at beachfront resorts, where they made few hires, according to a recent legislative audit. The audit also found that the district had no mechanisms for evaluating the effectiveness of these trips, which resulted in wasted taxpayer money, as stated by the Legislative Counsel Bureau Audit Division. The division examined recruitment programs from July 2021 through June 2024. “Some recruitment trips conducted by CCSD were ineffective, expensive, and did not travel established question policy,” the audit states. Two of the five trips examined “contained grounds that CCSD unit wasted nationalist funds.” The Las Vegas Review‑Journal first reported on the trips in late 2023. The news organization’s investigation revealed that district recruiters took nearly 40 out‑of‑town trips from mid‑September 2022 to early August 2023, at a cost of about $159,000, not including employee salaries. District officials could not specify how many hires resulted from these trips, citing inadequate tracking systems. “The audit validated what you had investigated before,” said John Vellardita, enforcement manager of the Clark County Education Association. “Not only was there no program that made sense — no strategic plan, no current program — but clearly the trips were excessive. And one has to question whether they were appropriately authorized.” The audit includes nine recommendations for district improvement, all of which the district has accepted. The trips reviewed occurred under a former action squad during the 2023/2024 period, the district said in a statement to the Review‑Journal. At that time, the district was led by Superintendent Jesus Jara. According to the statement, the district “has already implemented new tracking and metrics of recruitment efforts, which are now mostly focused on filling special education classrooms.” During the audit period, the school district spent approximately $14.6 million on recruiting programs and $393 million on retention programs. ‘Hopefully, we’ll put a halt to it’ Seventeen district staff members attended a recruiting event in Miami that included a six‑day stay over the Fourth of July holiday, the audit states. The cost exceeded $32,000, auditors calculated, and yielded no new hires. Eight staff members participated in a recruiting event at a hotel in Honolulu, at a cost the audit said was more than $23,000. Two hires are linked to that event. The audit notes that in an earlier trip by two staff members, 10 employees were hired at a cost of $4,600. One recruiter attended a “fraternal conclave event” — a fraternity league — in Houston for six nights totaling $4,700. “Upon review, this was chiefly a networking event, and there were no outcomes tracked to warrant the benefits of this trip,” the reports states. Among the audit’s recommendations are the following: ■ Develop a recruitment and retention plan. ■ Develop and track key performance indicators. ■ Evaluate the effectiveness of programs. ■ Analyze information collected through worker exit and restitution surveys. ■ Comply with state reporting requirements. ■ Provide training to recruitment staff related to fraud, waste and abuse to ensure funds are spent in alignment with district policy. ■ Develop policies that provide guidance for recruitment‑related travel. Vellardita, the head of the district teachers union, said the district must focus its recruitment efforts on the specific types of teachers needed and ensure it has qualified staff or consultants to develop a refined recruitment plan. He added that he would like to see regular and timely recruitment updates placed on school board agendas. When Nevada legislator PK O’Neill first learned of the recruiters’ travel to Miami in 2023, the then‑Assembly majority leader described it as “damn near criminal.” On Monday, he said he still feels the same way. “The Miami trip was just so egregious to the taxpayers,” said O’Neill, a former police officer. But with the audit and the required follow‑up, “Hopefully, we’ll put a halt to it.” He continued, “This is why the press is necessary. … Otherwise, just think about where this could have been swept under the rug, way under the rug.”