The Las Vegas City Council in a unanimous vote today appointed Adam Johnson to the Clark County School District School Board to serve as the city’s representative.
Johnson will serve a four-year term as a nonvoting member of the board, which has seven elected members.
“It is an incredibly humbling honor to be able to receive the support of you all who have incredibly strong vision for where you want the city to go and what our city can be through leveraging education,” Johnson said after his appointment. “We all have a privilege to be able to be what we want, to fulfill our potential, and that comes through education.”
Councilwoman Victoria Seaman and Mayor Carolyn Goodman initially voted against Johnson’s appointment, but later asked for their votes to be changed.
Johnson is senior director of the Western region for College Board, the nonprofit that administers the SAT and Advanced Placement tests. He began his career in business before switching to education organizations like Teach For America in 2011 and Democracy Prep Public Schools in 2016.
Johnson comes from a family of educators, he said. His mother is a doctor and father is a teacher, which inspired him to teach.
“I would trust my own children with (Johnson); he’s been an excellent role model for my kids and I think he’ll do the same for many, many, many people in our community,” Mayor Pro Tem Brian Knudsen said. “This is an enormous time commitment … but the fact that you still want to do it means something to our community.”
This move follows the approval of Assembly Bill 175, which was passed during this year’s legislative session and adds four nonvoting members to the board. Clark County, Henderson and North Las Vegas will also appoint a member before the law takes effect in July.
The appointee must live in the jurisdiction of the governing body that appoints them and will have the same rights and responsibilities as voting members. This means Johnson will be involved in briefings, interviews, evaluations, closed-door sessions and policy and operational discussions that the board has.
He will be expected to attend the board’s regular meetings and closed meetings twice a month, each running about three hours, city officials said. Two-hour work sessions, one-on-one meetings with the superintendent and additional meetings such as community-input meetings are possible.
Additionally, graduation ceremonies at city schools will require Johnson’s attendance.
“While I won’t have a vote in those spaces, I do have the opportunity to have plenty of conversations with a variety of people and help them understand that all of us stakeholders want to move forward,” Johnson said.
Knudsen was the one to propose Johnson’s appointment in the meeting. He said he’s known Johnson for 15 years and the two of them have had discussions about education multiple times, with Johnson often voicing opposition to Knudsen.
Those respectful disagreements and Johnson’s “courage and guts” to go against Knudsen are what made Knudsen believe Johnson would be a good choice, he explained.
“That’s what I think the school board needs, and the community needs that — all boards need that — is to raise the bar of excellence that we can have good discourse, disagree and move forward in the best way possible for children,” Knudsen said about Johnson’s ability to argue his own opinions.
Johnson was in consideration for this spot alongside two other community members, Elena Fabunan and Eric Preiss.
Goodman said this position will be “very heavily a time commitment” for Johnson, but gives him the “opportunity to be a voice” in special meetings.
She added that her initial “nay” vote wasn’t against Johnson specifically, but because she felt Preiss has “proven himself very well for the city in the business venue,” which council members said they were looking for in their candidates.
Goodman expressed her frustration with Clark County’s poor standings in education rankings and the fact that Las Vegas has little influence over the happenings in CCSD. The city’s efforts — such as after-school programs and charter schools — have helped, but charter schools “are not the answer,” she added.
“Fix what’s broken, don’t keep having other alternatives and giving people money to be able to do other alternatives,” Goodman said to Johnson during the meeting. “The reality is public education is public education, and it’s (an) embarrassment that this country is in the mess it’s in, much less that we are not setting an example in Southern Nevada.”