The Clark County School Board should make quick work of its special meeting today on whether to retain Superintendent Jesus Jara.
Jara should stay put, period. This is not a difficult call.
Not only would ousting him be unjustified, it would be calamitously disruptive at a time when the Clark County School District’s 320,000 students and their families need stability in leadership. With less than a month remaining before the first day of classes in the 2020-21 school year, a change in administration would introduce even more uncertainty into a situation already teeming with it.
Let’s be clear: There’s no compelling reason to push Jara out of the district based on what we know going into the meeting.
The push to oust Jara bubbled up amid an overblown dispute between the superintendent and state leaders over the source of a legislative proposal to allow the district to snatch up year-to-year budget savings by school principals. Jara claims CCSD didn’t initiate the measure; state officials say it did come from CCSD. The proposal, which wasn’t passed, would have changed a current practice of allowing school principals to benefit from their budget management efforts by using savings they incurred on other school projects.
The fact that it became an imbroglio probably says more about the tensions surrounding the recent special session of the Legislature than about anything else. The proposal could have simply been dropped quietly — Jara asked House Speaker Jason Frierson to pull it from consideration shortly before the session got underway — and it would likely have bubbled away without a great deal of attention.
But the bill went forward, Jara failed to support it, tempers blew up and here we are.
Emotions brought us to where we stand today. It’s time for everyone involved to put them on the shelf and use reason from this point forward. In other words, it’s time for school boards and administrators to do what adults encourage students to do when they are in conflict: work together to understand each other and to calm down. By elevating this to the board level, it’s the equivalent of an after-school fight instead of working through problems.
Looking at the situation logically, it’s clear Jara should stay. Not only is that because of the need for stability, but he’s been an effective leader for the district.
Jara hasn’t simply promised to improve the district, he and his team have methodically diagnosed CCSD’s shortcomings and created research-based plans to move the district forward. He’s given the community a warts-and-all look at the state of the district, and taken accountability for fixing the long list of what’s broken.
Jara has spoken candidly about the education gap between students at lower-income schools and their peers in more affluent areas of the region. He’s spotlighted a technology gap that contributes to that imbalance, with many students in lower-income families lacking the computer technology and internet connectivity they need to study at home and keep up with their higher-income peers.
Jara has worked to improve K-12 education for all students in Clark County, through such initiatives as establishing a standardized curriculum, adding advanced-placement courses in lower-income schools, and engaging business partners to help provide technology to students in need.
Efforts like this have won Jara respect in the community. That’s reflected in a letter to the school board from Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, Clark County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick, North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee and Henderson Mayor Debra March expressing support for the superintendent.
Let’s not forget either that the Clark County Education Association, the union that represents about 18,000 CCSD teachers, is defending Jara from what it rightly calls the “reckless and irresponsible” effort to fire him. Going into the special meeting, the union is vowing to reveal a backstory on the flap that includes details “conveniently left out (of the public discourse) by those who want to remove” Jara, it said in a statement.
There clearly is not a slam-dunk case to push Jara out of the district.
Did he mishandle the situation at the Legislature? Maybe, maybe not. But if he did, the school board should manage him, not fire him. Barring some unforeseen information, it certainly seems like a fixable problem. Let’s model behavior for our students, shall we?
What’s certain is that this is no time for more turmoil, especially when it’s not unquestionably warranted. The pandemic has provided more than enough disruption for local students and families.