Connect with us

Nevada

CCSD sponsors teacher retention, bullying bills for state legislature

Published

on

CCSD sponsors teacher retention, bullying bills for state legislature


The Clark County School District sponsored two bills for the legislative session, which started on Monday.

One of the bills aims to aid the school district in its teacher recruitment, retention and development. The other is designed to help with bullying, according to agenda items for Wednesday’s work session.

Teacher retention

Assembly Bill 47 would require money in the Education Stabilization Account that exceeds a certain amount to be allocated to school districts to use for the retention, recruitment and training of educational personnel.

Advertisement

As it stands, money in the Education Stabilization Account cannot exceed 20 percent of the State Education Fund.

CCSD’s bill would require any money that exceeds this amount to be transferred to the state Department of Education, which would then allocate money to for each school district in Nevada, proportional to the number of students, to use for retention, recruitment and training.

Teacher recruitment is a top issue in CCSD. The school district has more than 18,000 teacher positions in the district to fill every year and started the 2024-2025 school year with approximately 1,030 classroom vacancies.

Bully can move schools

Assembly Bill 48 would give the School Board the authority to move a student deemed to be “a perpetrator of discrimination based on race, bullying or cyberbullying” to another school.

Advertisement

The board already has the authority to move the victim of a bully, but this bill would allow administrators to look at the situation at the school and evaluate what is best.

The first hearing for the bill is tentative scheduled for Feb. 18, according to agenda items.

Both bills were pre-filed on Nov. 19. The board will discuss the two bills and its legislative priorities as a whole, at Wednesday’s work session.

The Clark County Education Association has not taken a position on any bills yet, according to Executive Director John Vellardita.

The Nevada Department of Education remains neutral on all submitted bills, according to a spokesperson for the department.

Advertisement

Contact Katie Futterman at kfutterman@reviewjournal.com. Follow @ktfutts on X and @katiefutterman.bsky.social.



Source link

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Nevada

Nevada lawmaker wants to expand paid family leave

Published

on

Nevada lawmaker wants to expand paid family leave


An effort to expand paid family and medical leave to Nevada’s public and private sector employees was introduced in the Nevada Legislature on Thursday.

Assemblymember Selena La Rue Hatch said she submitted a bill draft request to provide paid family and medical leave for workers in the state.

The legislation would provide parental leave for both childbirth and adoption. It would also include serious medical leave, military leave and “safe leave,” or the leave for victims of domestic violence.

La Rue Hatch, D-Reno, said the legislation came out of speaking with constituents who struggled with taking care of their health or families without the assurance of a paycheck.

Advertisement

“I talked with a graduate student at UNR — she gave birth, and then she had to be back in the lab in two weeks,” she said. “She had these terrible health complications because of it.”

She pointed out how the federal Family and Medical Leave Act only allows for unpaid leave, which can be a non-starter for low-income earners.

No bill language has been introduced yet. La Rue Hatch said she is still working on the details, including the number of weeks and the percentage of pay a worker would receive, but she wants it to be “meaningful” and not a symbolic amount.

Thirteen states and Washington D.C. have paid family leave policies, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Paid family leave has been in discussion at the Nevada Legislature before. A 2023 bill required businesses with 50 or more employees that receive tax exemptions from the state to provide at least 12 weeks of paid family leave to its employees after they have been employed for one year. Gov. Joe Lombardo vetoed the bill, but the policy was ultimately included in the special session law that provided funding to the Major League Baseball development plan.

Advertisement

Eligible state employees are entitled to eight weeks of paid family leave under a law passed in the same year.

The proposal may face Republican opposition. Officials with the Governor’s Office of Economic Development – the agency responsible for awarding tax abatements and other economic development incentives — told legislators in February 2024 that Nevada “experienced some headwinds” regarding attracting new businesses to the state because of the policy.

The introduction brought immediate support from progressive and health advocacy groups and labor unions.

“No cancer patient or caregiver should have to worry about losing their paycheck while facing a health crisis,” Adam Zarrin, director of state government affairs for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, said in a statement. “Paid family and medical leave eases that burden, allowing families to focus on treatment and recovery. Every family or caregiver facing a chronic illness in Nevada deserves this support.”

Contact McKenna Ross at mross@reviewjournal.com. Follow @mckenna_ross_ on X.

Advertisement



Source link

Continue Reading

Nevada

Nevada governor’s staff, with fixes, lands balanced budget

Published

on

Nevada governor’s staff, with fixes, lands balanced budget


CARSON CITY — The Governor’s Finance Office presented a structurally balanced budget at an evening legislative meeting Wednesday, roughly two weeks after Gov. Joe Lombardo’s staff presented its initial proposal with a $335 million deficit over the two-year budget.

Democrats at the earlier meeting blamed the deficit in part on the error of counting one-time appropriations as recurring expenditures. At Wednesday’s meeting, the governor’s staff said multiple amendments cut out such duplicate funding, explored funding reversions and made other changes to establish the balance.

Nevada’s constitution requires the Legislature to pass a balanced budget. Though the 83rd legislative session began on Monday, lawmakers have been meeting in multiple joint panels since Jan. 21 to hear budget proposals from state agencies.

Democrats at the January meeting said they were concerned with the governor’s plans, calling the deficit unprecedented and saying it made the following days of budgetary hearings difficult because they knew to expect changes.

Advertisement

The Governor’s Finance Office’s budget amendments total $164.1 million in fiscal year 2026 and $263.2 million in fiscal year 2027.

Some of the amendments cut the deficit by identifying duplicate costs in some of the governor’s priority bills. Other changes factored in more reversions, or previously allocated but unused funds.

Democrats asked Lombardo’s team to explain why they used one-time funding to support the expanded state-funded pre-K program. They said they worried that approach could lead to budget and programming cuts in future years.

“I sure hope whoever’s in these seats after us — I hope they have all kinds of revenue and that they can do this,” Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager, D-Las Vegas, said. “But without a commitment that there’ll be an effort to raise revenue in the future, if needed, I don’t want to have to pull the rug out from under folks.”

Ryan Cherry, Lombardo’s chief of staff, told the legislators one-time funding methods were chosen because that is how they were funded in the last budget cycle.

Advertisement

No Republicans asked questions during the Wednesday meeting evening, which lasted about two hours. Sen. Robin Titus, R-Wellington, said the back-and-forth on one-shot funding had to do with the influx of taxpayer money received through the American Rescue Plan Act and other COVID-19 pandemic economy efforts.

“We warned folks that we were spending this money way too fast on unsustainable programs, that we were going to fall off a fiscal cliff, and now everybody’s complaining that we are there,” she said, adding that to her, raising taxes is not acceptable. “The money is there, but the fact that all this conversation about, ‘I want guarantees that you’re going to find new funding’ — I think we find ways to spend less.”

Sen. Rochelle Nguyen, D-Las Vegas, asked if the state has created a contingency plan for potential cuts to Medicaid — as was a concern last week, when the Trump administration briefly directed all federal agencies to freeze funding to grants, loans and other programs. The directive was not meant to include impacts to programs that give directly to individuals, but some states reported issues with retrieving money through the online Medicaid system.

Cherry said they have directed the Medicaid administration to consider potential cuts.

“But right now, those are speculative,” Cherry said. “At this point, they’re not in law. We have to build a budget that is within the confines of federal and state law at this point.”

Advertisement

On Wednesday morning, Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro, Sen. Marilyn Dondero Loop and Sen. Fabian Doñate sent a letter to Cherry and the director of the Department of Health and Human Services asking information on the potential effects of federal Medicaid cuts, as is being considered by congressional Republicans.

Contact McKenna Ross at mross@reviewjournal.com. Follow @mckenna_ross_ on X.



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Nevada

Trump, Musk protestors gather at Nevada State Capitol as part of national protest – Carson Now

Published

on

Trump, Musk protestors gather at Nevada State Capitol as part of national protest – Carson Now


Tagged: frontpagefrontpage main

Kelsey is a fourth-generation Nevadan and holds BAs in English Literature and Anthropology from Arizona State University, and a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Lake Tahoe. She is…
More by Kelsey Penrose

Advertisement



Source link

Continue Reading

Trending