There are good reasons for a school board to fire a superintendent. But doing it in a spasm of political extremism or simply to shop around for a replacement who may or may not be an upgrade aren’t among them.
Unfortunately, it appears some members of the Clark County School District Board of Trustees are going after Superintendent Jesus Jara’s job — again — for the wrong reasons. The board today is scheduled to consider firing Jara, who in July 2020 faced a similar ouster attempt that was short-circuited when the trustees voted 4-3 to halt a special meeting before considering the matter.
Now, as then, tensions are running high as the district deals with the pandemic and its long-tail aftermath.
But now, as then, cooler heads need to prevail and the board needs to keep Jara. It’s critical to keep turmoil in the district to a minimum during these difficult times for the district’s 320,000 students and their families.
The reasons behind today’s ouster attempt aren’t clear, but it appears that anti-vaccination, anti-mask forces might be behind it.
The board agenda indicates that three members brought the item to the board but doesn’t identify them, and board members aren’t saying much. But one who has commented publicly is Danielle Ford, who acknowledged initiating the item and was also part of the movement to fire Jara in 2020. Ford is a right-leaning critic of COVID-19 safety measures who cast the lone vote against CCSD’s employee vaccine mandate in September.
Regarding her reasons for targeting Jara this time, all Ford has said publicly is that he’s “not the right leader for the district going forward.”
If the issue with Jara this time around is pandemic safety, he deserves to be commended, not fired, for his leadership on it. He followed medical advice and state guidelines while exercising an abundance of caution, and consistently demonstrated that his top priority was the safety and well-being of students and school personnel.
The results were painful, as many students and their families struggled with remote learning and returned to classes this year having fallen behind in their learning.
But Jara doesn’t deserve the blame — the pandemic does. He made a good-faith effort to uphold his responsibility to provide the best education possible while protecting students and staff.
Ideally, board members would pull together and support Jara as he continues to lead the district out of the crisis, as opposed to serving a loud group of anti-vax, anti-mask parents whose heads have been filled with misinformation and disinformation on vaccines and COVID safety. If left to their own devices, these parents would throw caution to the wind and leave children at risk.
The need for protections in schools isn’t simply a CCSD issue. COVID-19 outbreaks in classrooms don’t stay within school walls — the disease can and does spread to families and those with whom they interact. The entire community has an interest in keeping schools as safe as possible.
Meanwhile, Jara, who has been on the job since June 2018, hasn’t been given adequate time to implement his plan to improve student performance in the district. He was less than two years into the position when the pandemic knocked CCSD and every other school system off its trajectory.
It’s infuriating that members of the board have gone gunning for him without offering anything resembling a clear and compelling reason, but simply by sliding an item onto the agenda. It smells to high heaven as an effort to keep local residents out of involvement in a matter of intense community consequence and interest. This is kangaroo court behavior of the kind you normally have to go to Texas to see in action.
Here’s an issue that affects every student and every parent of a school-age child, and these board members don’t feel it’s necessary to give an explanation in advance of the agenda item?
Unacceptable.
We strongly urge that local residents not let these board members get away with their behavior, but rather to turn out in support of Jara.
Pushing him out at this point would merely cause another disruption in a system that needs continuity in leadership. It would trigger what could easily be a long search process, and at its essence is a roll of the dice that the board could find a more suitable candidate.
No, board members, the grass isn’t always greener somewhere else.
The majority of the board had the right idea in May, when the trustees voted 4-3 to extend Jara’s contract to January 2023.
In that meeting, trustee Linda Cavazos indirectly criticized Jara by saying she felt that he and the board often didn’t work as “a team of eight.”
True, that teamwork doesn’t exist. But the problem isn’t Jara, it’s that the team of seven trustees isn’t working together constructively. That’s evidenced by this latest vote to push Jara out of the door.
If the board wants to get the system back on solid footing and put it on the strongest path to recovery, it needs to band together and work constructively with Jara — not divide itself, remove him and create even more uncertainty for the district’s future.