LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — In the wake of the last legislative session, the money came rolling in.
"My eyes popped out of my head when I saw that our budget had jumped from $7 million to $10 million," said School Organizational Team parent member Jeremy Herman. "I said, 'Am I reading this right?!'"
Making good on Gov. Joe Lombardo's commitment to better fund education, lawmakers ensured schools throughout the state saw their designated dollars rise, increasing Nevada's average per-student funding to lift our state out of nearly last place in the nation.
But parent SOT members Amanda Stephens and Jeremy Herman say all that glitters is not gold.
"At first blush, that seems like great news," said Herman. "But the truth is, when you do some digging, you realize it's not as good as it sounds."
13 Investigates did that digging, and here's what we learned: the Nevada legislature provides funding for a certain number of teachers at each school, depending on the student population.
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At Ruthe Deskin Elementary, where Amanda is on the SOT, "We don't have a teacher and my daughter's in kindergarten. We have a substitute."
The Clark County School District currently has 1,151 licensed teacher vacancies, and for every unfilled teaching spot, schools have extra money.
"There's a teacher shortage. We can't get qualified teachers in the classroom," said former Nevada State Senator Scott Hammond, who sat on the Senate Education Committee.
In this year's session, Hammond helped pass new legislation allowing schools to carry over up to five percent of their budget to the next school year.
As for the rest, the condition is to use it or lose it.
"I don't love the use-it-or-lose-it mentality," said Hammond. That's because he says it's not easy to spend lots of money quickly. Whether getting purchase orders processed or waiting for bids to be approved, "Just to get permission to spend that money, the bureaucratic process takes too long."
Aside from the small percentage schools are allowed to carry over, any unspent money in a school's budget must be sent back to the state's Education Stabilization Fund — a general pool of money for the whole state that's like a rainy-day fund. Because schools don't want to lose money, they spend as much on whatever they can.
"They're forced to go on a shopping spree," said Herman, whose children attend Leavitt Middle School and Deskin Elementary. He serves on the SOTs at both.
"We have a wish list that includes, I think, six teachers at our middle school, and elementary school is somewhere around there — five or six. And those teachers aren't there to be hired. So, then we go down the list, and we start shopping for other people who are important for the functioning of the school but who are not quite as essential."
13 Investigates combed through School Organizational Team minutes across the district and found money building up in budgets under the General Supplies line item.
Judith Steele Elementary School's SOT minutes from Sept. 14 discussed how their extra money could be spent, including diversity programs and support for English language learners.
Minutes from Leavitt's September SOT meeting show most of the extra money in their budget will go toward salaries for additional administrative and support staff positions.
"And then, after we hire those five or six people, we still have all this extra money," said Herman. "So, we start painting the school, building an awning to protect kids from the sun, and then we still have like $1.5 million that we have to spend."
They'll spend between $600-700,000 on new classroom desks.
"Kids have to wear lanyards with their I.D.s on them, and they were in some cases being used to choke the kids, so we talked about investing in lanyards that break apart," Herman said.
They also discussed buying a shipping container and filling it with a decade's worth of supplies.
"Reams and reams and reams of paper--stuff that's not going to go bad—and putting a portable air conditioning unit in the shipping container so that it's not a million degrees out there in the sun."
Leavitt's extra money will also fund free tutoring, after-school programs and sports—all things Herman supports and agrees are beneficial but ultimately not essential.
He explains an analogy the school's former principal used. "He said that he feels like he's got a car that's got blinged-out rims, that's got a killer sound system, but the engine is dead. And he can't do anything about that engine." So, his top priority is getting that engine going by getting more teachers in the classroom, but it can't happen, so he's spending money on blinging out the school.
We contacted district leaders to ask if they had anything to say about the carryover money. They did not respond.
Hammond says he knows it might not look good.
"When you look at the totality of the district, there are so many millions of dollars that these schools are trying to figure out how to spend, but they can't spend it on the one thing they need most. How do we explain that to our viewers?" I asked.
"Yeah, well, the one thing they need most is teachers," Hammond said.
But since the teachers simply aren't there, he says state leaders must continue trying to solve the problem.
"Nevada State University, UNLV, you name it, the governor is busy figuring out how to create a pipeline so we can get more people into that profession."
A former teacher himself, Hammond says better salaries would bring more people to the teaching profession... further causing frustration that the money sitting in school coffers can't be used for teacher salaries and raises.
Herman says if they could give every teacher at Leavitt a 10-percent raise, "It would be less than a quarter of the extra money that we're getting. So, the money is there. The money is in schools. It just can't legally be spent on those teachers."
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Because of collective bargaining, principals can't spread the carryover money among the teachers at their individual schools. At least not now.
Hammond says lawmakers could change that.
"That would be a nice piece of legislation for the next legislative session: to give the freedom to those administrators to incentivize teachers."
As for the situation, "The optics are terrible for the school district," Herman said. "At a time when the district is fighting teachers on this, and the state is throwing money at schools. It doesn't look good. And I understand the anger. I'm angry as a parent that it's happening."
