As students gear up for the start of the new school year, Nevada is still scrambling to fill thousands of teacher and staff positions.
Roughly 3,000 teaching jobs remain unfilled across the state’s 17 school districts as some schools prepare to return to the classroom in early August, the Nevada State Education Association estimates.
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“We don’t have teachers for the classrooms, and I’m worried about lunch workers who aren’t going to be there to serve our kids meals that they need and have missed throughout the summer,” Dawn Etcheverry, president of the Nevada State Education Association, told ABC News. “And in our second-largest district, we don’t have bus drivers to start the school year. So kids will already go on a rotation of one week without a bus driver every four weeks.”
The staffing shortages are forcing schools to make tough decisions, including increasing class sizes.
“It’s hard to spend time one on one teaching a child how to do a fingering on a recorder when you’ve got 40 sitting in your classroom,” said Etcheverry, who is a music teacher. “Or let’s talk about a geometry teacher in a high school who now has 48 kids and they’re trying to read all the proofs.”
Clark County School District, which has about 320,000 students enrolled, has raised its teacher salary by $7,000 and provided $4,000 relocation bonuses to attract educators from other districts or out of state, the Washington Post reported.
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Other states are facing similar dilemmas. Some rural Texas school districts are switching to a four-day school week for the upcoming academic year, citing the staffing shortages.
