It’s no secret that Nevada education ranks almost last in the nation in a number of measurements. It’s an industry facing immense challenges and one that is in desperate need of solutions. Recently, education executives met at a roundtable to discuss education in the Silver State including its challenges, the effects of the recent pandemic and why Nevada is leaving students behind. This roundtable was sponsored by City National Bank and held in Las Vegas.
Connie Brennan, publisher and CEO of Nevada Business Magazine, served as moderator for the event. These monthly roundtables bring together different industries to discuss issues and solutions.
WHAT CHALLENGES ARE EDUCATORS FACING IN NEVADA?
Steve Buuck: As a young principal 25 years ago, I remember challenging our faculty with preparing kids for their future and not our past. I don’t care what journal article you read, somewhere between 50 and 85 percent of the jobs that our first graders are going to have [in the future] do not exist yet. How do we prepare kids for things that we’re not even sure what that looks like?
Dr. Jesus Jara: If you look at our numbers, the state in Nevada only produces 34 teachers with a math degree. I have 49 high schools and 59 middle schools [in the Clark County School District]. I need educators.
Shelley Berkley: We are very, very thin [on educators]. And it is not only with math teachers and English teachers, which are so important in the earlier grades and beyond, but it is the specialties [that are also lacking educators]. There are children that have significant challenges and look to the school district to work with them and there is a dearth of those qualified teachers as well. And we’re not adequately paying our teachers. We tell them we value them, and we love them, but we don’t pay them enough to sustain a family. They are coming out of their own pocket for school supplies. We make it extraordinarily difficult for them to do their job and then we tell them how valued they are. And in our society, the way you measure value is partly by what you bring home to support your family. And if you can’t support your family, after a few years of working in the Clark County School District, you are going to go become a realtor, a change person or a dealer.
Roxanne Stansbury: We have so many competing issues right now with the fact that we are already a state that experiences tremendous teaching shortages and now we have the “Great Resignation” and a city whose cost of living continues to rise. How are we going to get teachers to consider [moving and working here]? I have worked so many recruitment fairs and people walk by us because the stigma of Las Vegas is real. How do we get people to come here and want to be educators and be able to have a comfortable living wage here?
Dr. DeRionne Pollard: What we have done to public education in this country is said, “We value you; we want you to raise and lift all the tides, but we are not going to fund you.” And we put [educators] in horrible situations where we have underfunded capital. We give [teacher] salaries [that make then unable to] support them and their families. We also put them in governance models that are archaic and that oftentimes belittle them. Who would choose to become a teacher right now?
HOW IS MENTAL HEALTH AFFECTING EDUCATION?
Berkley: In the postgraduate world we are experiencing an uptick in mental health issues. We are investing resources in hiring on-site people to help the students if they have a challenge. I am sorry to say that we have seen an uptick [in mental health issues] not only during COVID, but pre-COVID and now post-COVID. I am very concerned about that. It is a big challenge. I don’t know whether the students are putting more pressure on themselves [because we have] very intense curriculum. But this is something I never thought I would have to grapple with. There is nothing worse than getting a call in the middle of the night saying one of your students has been admitted to St. Rose on a suicide attempt. It does not happen very often, but a general lack of coping [in our students] is becoming more and more of a problem.
Dr. J. Kyle Dalpe: We’re seeing it outside of Clark County as well. In the six rural counties we handle, students do not have access to almost anything. They do not have access to healthcare facilities and so they lean on us for it. Mental health counselors, nurses and a healthcare structure does not exist [in our rural counties] either. And so [students] get into a [mental] space [where they think], “I can’t even find a solution,” and then you get the call saying somebody might have done something [dangerous to themselves].
Stansbury: I don’t think anybody is immune to [the mental health crisis]. We see the same thing. Most of our constituents have resources [and yet] they are still waiting three to six months to get a child who is in crisis in to be seen by someone. That tells you how saturated the mental health field is here.
Pollard: The other thing that worries me is, we appropriately focus on the mental health of our students but we are not talking about the mental health of our employees. Not only are they oftentimes grappling with how to support their students, but they are also experiencing [mental health challenges] in their own homes. They are grappling with paychecks and insurance issues and loss of life. I got into a debate with someone who suggested that all of us are experiencing COVID the same and I said no. Some of us were making trips away during COVID, we could go and [take a] COVID vacation in a home someplace for a month or two away. And others of us were figuring out how to pay for funerals. There is a very big difference and oftentimes the intersection of that has been with our faculty and staff.
Tami Hance-Lehr: One of the partnerships we have is with UNLV to practice [mental healthcare]. Even before the pandemic, Communities in Schools had been offering telehealth and tele-mental health in the Elko County School District for about six years. Now we have expanded that and it’s happening here in Las Vegas, but [also] in our rural school district. I have kiddos in Elko and Winnemucca that now get to talk to a UNLV Practicum (intern) professional and help with their mental health.
Claude Grubair: We have tried to increase the personnel to be able to address [the mental health crisis in our schools], but we know that is not sustainable. It is becoming an exponential concern that is happening very quickly. [At Meadows] we brought in Dr. Michelle Borba, the author of “Thrivers”, to talk to the faculty and now she is going to talk to our parents. The basis of this book is that our kids have lost their ability to be resilient and that character education has been thrown out. We have really weakened our kid’s ability to handle situations and at the core of it, they can’t solve problems anymore. They need everybody to solve [problems] for them. What is becoming the issue here is that problems that kids are usually at one point able to solve, can’t [solve them] anymore. And now we’re going to throw an unlimited amount of resources at a problem that was not a problem really that long ago. We have got to get back to getting kids able to help themselves again because they have lost that.
Dr. Keith Whitfield: One of the efforts that we are making at UNLV is to have a digital president. We want to talk to every single one of [our students who are struggling with mental health], and the logistics is that you cannot do that. [We asked ourselves] how could we have another source of reach [to address mental health challenges] with these kids that are living and thriving in a digital space? We are using digital artificial intelligence to be able to do that.
WHAT EFFECT DID THE PANDEMIC HAVE ON EDUCATION?
Gil Lopez: One of the biggest challenges is the learning loss that took place during the pandemic [for students]. I call [those students] the pandemic babies. These are the pre-kindergarten (pre-K), kindergarten and first graders that did virtual school from the beginning. That generation is really messed up when it comes to being acclimated into the school system.
Whitfield: COVID exacerbated many different things. [For example], going from 13 [years old] to 14 or 12 to 13, is hard enough developmentally. When you add in social isolation [from online learning] and [eliminate] learning how to be in a classroom and [participating in] group activities during a time when you are supposed to be developing, changing and thinking about yourself and how you fit in or do not fit in, [that is really difficult on children]. All of those things were taken away [during COVID] and now we just dropped them back in. There was no phasing. It is like one day we were [at school] and the next day we were not. Then one day we [were learning at home] and the next day we [were back in the classroom].
Pollard: I want someone to be courageous enough to talk about what [COVID] did to executives who led institutions during [the pandemic]. I was easily working 18 to 20 hours a day, literally trying to keep an organization open and trying to figure out how to make it paycheck to paycheck. And then you have all the people from the outside in telling you what to do, trying to legislate you, telling you to prove this in order to get that. And now we are supposedly in recovery, and yet we are still not. It is not sexy to talk about the [mental health] issues of our employees [as a result of the pandemic] because we want to focus on students, and it is certainly less sexy to talk about the impact on the executives of our organization.
Lopez: There was an uptake in behavioral issues throughout last year, but it tended to just happen the first semester, coming back [from remote learning due to COVID]. [There were] some fluency and attendance issues and social media challenges were a big problem in the schools, but the second semester, [students] tended to pick it back up, and they were ready to go. But kindergarten students and first graders [who began their education remotely] are still having issues. I think it is [because] they were learning online through [the pandemic] and they have not been able to catch up.
DO NEVADANS VALUE A HIGHER EDUCATION?
Pollard: The number one issue we are facing is trying to articulate the value proposition of higher education in a state that has underfunded higher education and even [underfunded education in] kindergarten through twelfth grade. That oftentimes has crafted a master narrative where one is able to graduate from high school and go work on the strip or go work in the mines and therefore, the idea of attending college is something that is problematic. As a result of that, we are leaving people behind. We will continue to be 48, 46, 40-whatever in the nation as it relates to college-going adults if we don’t systematically change the narrative, and I don’t know if there is a will to do that.
Dalpe: From a rural perspective, we are seeing a lot of students going straight to work. Nearly 70 percent of our students are part-time, and anybody can get a job if they are willing to get up off the couch and go after it. Packaging that in a way that we can continue to get people in the pipeline [is a challenge]. Not necessarily for a 30-credit certificate or a two-year degree, or even a four-year degree, but get them in the pipeline with some skills so that workers can advance them up and then bring them back. That balance between workplace and college is what we spend a lot of time doing. Employers have to be willing to give a little bit and let incumbent workers get trained so they can get from a level one to two and three. Employees are looking at me to know that [post-secondary education] is going to [provide] value down the road.
Dr. Federico Zaragoza: I have been in multiple higher education systems and from day one when I came to Nevada, I had my eyes focused on the pipeline. The consequences [of not valuing higher education] is declining enrollment for community colleges. Community colleges tend to serve a very unique population in terms of income and oftentimes people that are left behind are the kinds of students that come to community colleges. We are already leaving them behind as [evident] by the national declining enrollment trends.
Renee Coffman: I think the narrative around education and the value proposition [of education] is key. There is a lot in the news [that questions] if a higher education is valuable and we know that it is. There are a lot of talks about student loans and our student loan default rate is less than 1 percent. There are pockets of excellence and pockets of goodness out there that do not get enough attention brought to them.
WHY IS NEVADA SO BEHIND IN EDUCATION?
Berkley: I would say the biggest challenge that we have from kindergarten through professional schools is money. You cannot educate people without the requisite amount of money to pay teachers and to provide your students with the latest technology, which is extremely costly. Unless we adequately fund our education system, we will remain 49th in the United States. That impacts economic development, it impacts the wellbeing of our children and ultimately our families, and it impacts our workforce.
Jara: The size of the school district is not the problem. The biggest problem is the set of low expectations that we have for children in this state. For me to graduate kids, it only takes 22.5 credits and that is it as determined by educators. There are no outside exit exams or showing of mastery. I graduate kids that most likely cannot complete a job application because there are no expectations from the state. And then [students] go into [post-secondary] institutions and they are in remedial courses and then they are in the community.
Zaragoza: Our success [at the College of Southern Nevada] is going to be based on the success of the public school system and about 80 percent of the students that come to us are not college ready.
Grubair: A big issue that I have noticed [in Nevada compared] to where I was, is that we are going through the challenges I have already been through and we are having conversations now that I had 12 to 15 years ago. I’m trying to show people that I have a cheat sheet to really shorten this gap of time because we waste a lot of time [in Nevada].
Jara: We have not invested in education in kindergarten through twelfth [grade]. We are the lowest funded urban school system in America, yet I read yesterday in Forbes [that the Nevada gaming wins exceeded $1 billion for] 17 months in a row. Where are the priorities in this state?
Pollard: We are still living in old systems that are going to produce the outcomes that business leaders are saying that they want us to be held accountable for. There is a public reckoning happening right now as it relates to education.
