By Brandon Davis Special to the Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 4, 2026 - 9:01 pm
Ask a genitor successful the Las Vegas Valley what they privation from our nationalist schools, and the reply is simple. A bully teacher. A people tiny capable to larn in. The resources to bash the job. Ask whether our schools are delivering, and the honorable reply is that excessively overmuch of our wealth ne'er reaches the schoolroom wherever those things happen.
In caller legislative sessions, immoderate lawmakers person reached for caller gross to adjacent the gap, floating taxes connected integer goods and services, and a authorities committee has laid retired a paper of spot and income taxation changes to rise billions more. The request is real. But earlier we inquire families already squeezed by the outgo of surviving to wage more, we beryllium them to inquire 1 question: Are we spending what we already person wherever it counts?
Right now, no.
Barely fractional of each K-12 dollar successful Nevada reaches schoolroom instruction, beneath the nationalist average. In Clark County, the unit moving extracurricular the schoolroom grew astir 30 percent betwixt 2019 and 2023, adjacent arsenic enrollment fell and the fig of teachers dropped. As the Review-Journal has documented, the district’s administrative ranks person outpaced its teachers for years. In 2022, the mean head made astir $147,000 successful wage and benefits, portion the mean teacher made $84,000. Today, less than fractional of the district’s employees are schoolroom teachers. Some of that maturation rode successful connected one-time national pandemic dollars that person since tally out, which is each the much crushed to analyse the spending that remains.
None of this is the responsibility of teachers. They are stretched bladed and underpaid, and they are not the ones deciding wherever the dollars go. Too overmuch of the wealth stops astatine the cardinal bureau earlier it ever reaches their classroom, and the shortfall shows up wherever you would expect. In immoderate of our agrarian counties, students are inactive learning from textbooks older than they are.
Nevada has already shown that smarter spending works. When the authorities stopped spreading its at-risk dollars bladed crossed hundreds of thousands of students and aimed them astatine the children astir successful need, enactment per pupil climbed from astir $300 to astir $3,000, with nary taxation increase.
So present is simply a way that costs taxpayers thing more, and legislators would beryllium well-suited to instrumentality it up adjacent session. Cap the maturation of administrative and non-classroom positions truthful it tracks pupil enrollment. When enrollment is level oregon falling, the cardinal bureau should not grow. Protect each relation that touches a kid — the teachers, aides, counselors, nurses and peculiar acquisition unit — and signifier it successful done mean attrition, not layoffs. Then nonstop the savings, by law, to the 3 things families consciousness most: higher teacher pay, smaller classes and existent schoolroom resources. Pair it with honorable transparency, an autarkic nationalist number of however overmuch of each dollar really reaches the classroom.
Children successful Las Vegas are not asking for a taxation hike connected their parents. They privation a bully teacher, a manageable people and the tools to succeed. The wealth is already successful the system. We request the resoluteness to determination it backmost wherever it belongs.
Fund the schoolroom first.
Brandon Davis is simply a Las Vegas small-business proprietor and public-school parent. He represents District E connected the Clark County School District’s Attendance Zone Advisory Commission.
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