For the good of the Clark County School District and the entire state of Nevada, everyone involved in the blow-up involving CCSD Superintendent Jesus Jara and state leaders needs to take a step back and cool down.
That especially includes school board members who have called a special meeting to fire Jara.
Terminating the superintendent would be unwise at this moment and invite a completely unnecessary sense of chaos and insecurity for students, parents, teachers and staff in an already fraught time. Crisis-stretched emotions are running too high, and there’s too much at stake for the 320,000 students of CCSD to make a heat-of-the-moment leadership change.
The turmoil, sparked by a rushed proposal to allow CCSD to sweep up surplus funding from individual schools, has grown entirely out of proportion and dangerously overheated. The basis is a dispute about who was responsible for proposing the legislation — CCSD or state education leaders.
The measure has engendered controversy because it would circumvent a provision in CCSD’s recent reorganization that gave school principals some budget management flexibility, including the ability to carry over unspent funds from year to year. That flexibility was important given that the reorganization, which received bipartisan support, transferred much of CCSD’s centralized control of schools to principals. The move incentivized efficiency and creativity by principals because their schools could keep money saved to enhance other programs. Allowing CCSD to take the funds would amount to raiding school budgets and punishing principals for being good money managers.
What we know is that shortly before the measure was brought forward, Jara contacted legislative leadership and asked for it to be pulled from consideration. But lawmakers, who contend that CCSD requested the change, went forward with it. When it was introduced, Jara testified as neutral on it.
That’s where the dynamite went off, with everyone pointing fingers about who was to blame. Tempers flared, no doubt amplified by the tensions that lawmakers and the district are facing amid the coronavirus pandemic.
But those tensions are exactly why all sides of the matter need to settle down, take a deep breath and come back to the matter when they can make decisions based on facts rather than uncertainty, fear and anger. In normal times, more work on such a bill would have been done by all stakeholders, and disputes like this would be part of the process and hammered out collegially without recriminations and rash retribution.
Nevada needs leadership to be clear-eyed and focused on the long-term interests of the state, not what amounts to a political flare-up over a bill nobody ultimately wanted anyway.
Jara, who is two years into a three-year contract, has been a good leader for CCSD. He has aggressively gone about identifying the district’s shortcomings, creating plans to resolve them and establishing accountability measures to ensure that progress is made.
He’s also shown a particularly good eye for spotting the district’s most pressing problems and challenging the community to join him in solving them, such as an achievement gap between students in low-income schools versus their peers in more affluent areas.
Jara further has moved the district forward on such critical needs as uniform curriculum and deferred maintenance for school buildings and other facilities.
As with any public official, his actions should be scrutinized and he should be held accountable. But when board members evaluate him, they must do so in an objective, rational and level-headed way. Only then can they assure the public their decisions are being made in the best interests of everyone involved and not out of pique.
One thing for certain is that this is a horrible time to make a leadership change, with so much uncertainty ahead of us in the fall semester and with the district facing so many budget challenges. To force a leadership change for such a small dispute would be a kind of malfeasance we can’t afford now.
The board members who are seeking Jara’s ouster should back down. A cooling-off period is desperately needed.
With a little less than a year on his contract, Jara has time to fix the damage with lawmakers before the 2021 regular session. He should be given that chance. Meanwhile, state leaders owe it to Nevadans to work toward reconciliation as well, and put this situation behind us. Lest anyone forget: We’re in a crisis and in a crisis everyone should both pull together as best they can and understand that emotions are high.
The pandemic isn’t over by a long shot, as proven alarmingly Thursday when the state recorded a record 1,447 new cases of COVID-19. We’re in a desperate fight to educate our children while keeping them and the adults around them safe.
Our kids need sanity and sense to prevail as we prepare for the fall. We need all hands — especially Jara’s -- on deck and working together.