When Principal Anthony Nuñez first arrived at Cheyenne High School in North Las Vegas three years ago, the school was in crisis. 

About 40 percent of the school’s 100 teacher positions were vacant — causing larger class sizes and a heavy reliance on long-term substitute teachers.

The outlook wasn’t much better districtwide: The Clark County School District (CCSD) started the 2022-23 school year with about 1,400 vacancies out of approximately 16,000 total classroom teacher positions, according to district data from a public records request. That vacancy rate, more than 8 percent, was the district’s highest in the past six years. 

But two years later, Cheyenne and the state’s largest school district have managed to turn things around. 

CCSD started its new academic year Aug. 11 with just 320 classroom teacher vacancies, according data provided by the district. That vacancy rate was the lowest in the past six years by about 2 percent, and its teacher retention rate sat at about 94 percent — a 6 percentage point increase from the 2022-23 school year. It also had the highest number of classroom teachers (about 16,000) at the start of the school year compared to the previous six years. 

It comes two years after state lawmakers and Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo approved a $2.6 billion increase in K-12 education funding as well an additional $250 million for salary bumps for teachers and support staff through a 2023 bill, SB231. These funds enabled school districts statewide to raise teacher pay, including by as much as 22 percent in CCSD. The district also used SB231 dollars to provide additional compensation to attract teachers to special education positions or schools with high vacancy rates. 

Coupled with other ongoing efforts to bolster the state’s teacher pipeline and improve school culture and climate, it has resulted in improved teacher attrition rates statewide even as nationwide teacher shortage persists. 

CCSD’s improvement would not have been possible without the 2023 state funding, CCSD Superintendent Jhone Ebert said in a Wednesday interview. 

“​​We needed to do an investment. That needed to shift,” she said.

It’s made a difference at Cheyenne, which started the school year with six vacancies. 

“This was the easiest hiring season ever,” Nuñez said. “People were like, ‘I really want to work at this school.’” 

Although teacher pay bumps in CCSD’s latest two-year contract were limited thanks to flat state funding, district officials are hopeful that additional funds for hard-to-fill positions from a 2025 bill, coupled with the ongoing efforts to improve the state’s teacher workforce, will help CCSD keep the momentum and bring its vacancies down even further.

It’s especially crucial as recently passed school accountability measures, including punitive interventions such as a possible state takeover, roll out over the next few years. 

“Without qualifying, caring teachers, our students are less likely to succeed,” Nuñez said at a July press conference where CCSD first announced its reduced teacher vacancies. “Guest teachers work very hard to serve our students, but there really is not a substitute for a fully licensed teacher in a content area.”

Statewide improvement

Data Insight Partners, a local education data analysis company, independently verified the retention and vacancy numbers in an Aug. 7 thread on X. As an effort to rebut what they called widespread skepticism around the district’s numbers, the organization pointed to CCSD’s annual staffing reports, which are updated monthly, to show that the district had more than 19,000 licensed educators including classroom and nonclassroom teachers,. That’s about 400 more than than it had at the same time last year, and a jump from 2022 when the district had fewer than 18,000 staff.

“There are significantly MORE teachers AND vacancy rates are down,” Data Insight Partners wrote in the post.

At Cheyenne High School, Nuñez said the increase in fully licensed teachers allowed the school to bring its class sizes down, and provide more instructional time.

Meanwhile, its graduation rate has risen from 75 percent in the 2021-22 school year to above 85 percent last school year, just a few percentage points below the school’s prepandemic graduation rate. Cheyenne students have also made gains in reading and math on standardized testings.

“We have the staff, we’ve increased our instructional time, so I really like that we are going to accelerate,” Nuñez said. 

But it’s not just CCSD that’s seeing a difference in its teacher workforce.

Data Insight Partners recently worked with the Nevada Department of Education to track the state’s teacher workforce and found that the teacher attrition rate saw a 30 percent year-over-year improvement after the pay raises were put in place.

“So all the evidence is that money was going to the purpose it was intended, which was to make salaries more attractive, to create incentives to retain people — it happened,” said Data Insight Partners co-founder and partner Nathan Trenholm. 

Up north, the Washoe County School District announced before its first day of school that the district hired 280 new teachers — 90 more than were hired during the entire 2024-25 school year.

WCSD’s teacher vacancy rate has gone from 4.35 percent in 2023 to 3.42 percent this year, district Chief Human Resources Officer Doug Owen said in a Monday interview. 

As of Friday, the district still had 102 openings among its 3,600 teacher positions allocated for this school year. Some positions are temporarily filled by retirees, short- and long-term substitute teachers as well as current teachers as needed. Owen said the 15 percent teacher pay raises and bonuses for new and existing special education teachers along with other recruitment efforts have paid off. 

“I think a culmination of all those things … really led to more interest in the teaching profession,” he said. 

Beyond teacher pay 

While the pay raises have been helpful, officials from both districts also credited programs meant to increase the state’s teacher pipeline as instrumental to their recruitment efforts. 

UNLV has two pre-apprenticeship programs for high school and undergraduate students: one that allows students to earn college credits while they intern or work full-time at a Nevada school district or a charter, and another that allows existing school support staff to complete their bachelor’s degree in education while they continue working. 

UNLV previously offered an accelerated alternative route to licensure program, which provided a fast track for individuals with a bachelor's degree in a non-education field to earn a master’s degree in education while they work as a teacher. The program resulted in more than 600 new teachers, UNLV stated on its website. 

WCSD has its own alternative route to licensure program, which includes a pathway for teacher positions that work with students who are deaf or hard of hearing. 

Megan Griffard, a UNLV assistant professor in education policy and leadership, said these programs have helped teacher vacancies come down statewide even as enrollment in teacher preparation programs nationwide continue to be a “pretty serious decline.”  . 

“I think that the state has been particularly proactive in finding unique and novel ways to get aspiring teachers their licenses,” she said. 

Griffard said efforts at individual schools to improve their culture and work environments have been “motivating people to want to stay.”

Improving school safety and work culture at Cheyenne, including providing professional development opportunities during work hours, is part of Nuñez’s strategy to attract new teachers and help them stand out.

“I don’t want to say compensation doesn’t matter, but through this transition … more people were talking to me about time rather than compensation,” he said. 

However, Griffard said teacher pay will continue to be an important part of the equation.

“I think it's very important that the state continues to be mindful of the importance of the teacher workforce and giving them a quality of life that will keep them in education,” Griffard said. 

While there were no cost-of-living adjustments included in the district’s new two-year teacher contracts because of flat per pupil funding from the state, Ebert said she is hopeful that CCSD will be able to keep making progress. 

She pointed to a 2025 bill, AB398, that provides $90 million to districts, including $70 million to CCSD, so they can provide additional compensation for teachers in hard-to-fill positions. 

Ebert said she plans to come back to the 2027 Legislature and advocate for more funding. 

“We want to invest in our students, invest in our educators, the entire system, to lift it up, and that's going to include the 2027 legislative session,” she said.