ONSCREEN TEXT (0:06)
What has the Nevada Department of Education done to make teacher compensation competitive?
CRAIG STATUCKI (0:11)
Some of the things that we’re working on, obviously, is we’re always advocating for more education funding. In the last legislative session, our school funding formula changed. It’s the first time in 52 years that the formula’s been changed. And so really what has occurred now is it’s a single pot of funds as opposed to a pot for every little project going on, which provides districts a little bit more flexibility and how they can utilize those funds so they could utilize them to increase teacher salaries if that was an option available to them. But one of the things that we’re working on right now is we’ve utilized $20 million in ARP ESSER funds to incentivize teaching pathways, and so we’re utilizing those funds to provide stipends for student teachers and also tuition reimbursement for student teachers as well to help them with those costs because education’s one of those few professions where we ask people to take a pause from their life, temporarily stop working and work as a student teacher in a school building for free for 12 to 16 weeks.
And so to help relieve that burden on those potential future teachers is where we’re really looking to make an imprint now in terms of how we’re growing our own teachers and getting them really invested in State of Nevada becoming a teacher.
ONSCREEN TEXT (1:25)
What’s been the impact so far of providing these stipends?
CRAIG STATUCKI (1:29)
Too early to tell. We have in the year in change that we’ve implemented, we’ve spent almost $11 million of the $20 million. We fully expect to spend the full 20 million. We have two more rounds left in our spring, like most colleges, spring semester’s a big semester for student teaching. And so we fully expect to expand those funds and it’s worked out very well in terms of we’re actually looking for funding from our legislature in the next legislative session to continue that funding through state funding and not have it be a one shot. ARP ESSER, “We did it, it worked out well. Now we just have to find the rest of the money.” So we’re really hoping that our legislators really see the investment. We have I think seven colleges that have participated in that process, and so we think it’s been working out very well. Our teachers who are getting the stipend for student teaching are getting $8,400, and then $2,600 for tuition reimbursement, and we do have almost 1,000 teachers who have done the stipend.