Oops! School district ‘forgot’ to provide money for approved teacher raises

Topline: Nevada’s largest school district gave teachers an 8% raise this year, but it forgot to include the added expenses in its budget. The district made cuts but still has a $10 million deficit that is causing the governor to take notice.

Key facts: Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas, underestimated the average teacher’s salary by $5,700 in its January budget. Multiplied by the 16,500 teachers in the district, it’s an added expense of roughly $94 million that schools had no idea they would need to account for.

The district also forgot to use Nevada’s new formula for funding at-risk students. Over 3,000 kids in Clark County will no longer receive extra state funds, but the district expected the state to provide the students $928,000 anyway, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported.

Five administrators, 36 licensed professionals and 41 support professionals have been reassigned to lower-paying jobs to help free up money. Three staffers quit and four new hires will lose their jobs, according to the Review Journal.

Schools will also have fewer supplies and less programming. One parent told NBC3 his kindergartener’s “Accelerated Reading” class was cut, and two teachers and a social worker were let go from their school.

On top of the miscalculations, the district says it had higher legal costs than expected — $53 million instead of the $20 million budgeted, as well as an unexpected $15 million contract for cybersecurity software, after the district was hacked the year before.

Those underestimations are causing the district to have a $10 million shortfall — in addition to the staff pay and at-risk funding miscalculations.

The fiasco caused the Nevada Department of Taxation to form a new subcommittee that will monitor all of the district’s fiscal activities. The school may also be placed on “fiscal watch,” requiring them to give monthly financial updates to the state.

The district fired Chief Financial Officer Jason Goudie, who maintains the issues were caused by teacher raises and not by mistakes from his own staff. He was making $222,000 per year, according to OpenTheBooks.com.

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Supporting quote: “In my opinion, the errors in the budget preparation were not foreseeable because they were caused by mistakes; however, the mistakes were preventable, Interim Superintendent Dr. Brenda Larsen-Mitchell told the State of Nevada. “In my opinion, the mistakes were a result of insufficient process documentation and communication and organizational and process silos. The mistakes were not acceptable and should not have occurred.”

Summary: It’s not unheard of for complex budgets to misjudge small expenses. Forgetting the most generous contract in a school district’s history is a completely different matter.

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