One of my favorite photographs is of me standing in the quad of Walter Johnson Junior High School in Las Vegas. I'm sporting my school badge, my favorite cardigan and a big smile because I had just been named International Baccalaureate (IB) Teacher of the Month — nominated by students, not administrators — and someone wanted to mark the moment. Not bad for my second year in the classroom.

Two months later, I was surplused. In other words, I was slated for potential layoff.

I didn't become a teacher the traditional way. I had spent 15 years building a career in media and entertainment — producing live television, negotiating brand partnerships for global technology companies and evaluating scripts at one of the largest talent agencies in the world. I left it on purpose because I believed teaching was more important work. I would ultimately discover how little that belief protects you in a system that doesn't seem to value it.

As in many states, Nevada has invested money in building pipelines for career changers like me. The state's Alternative Route to Licensure program — the pathway I'm completing through the iteach certification system — was designed to bring people with professional experience into classrooms. The theory makes sense: A teacher who has actually worked in the fields that students are preparing to enter can make real connections between school and the world. For instance, when my students asked me why learning to write an effective argument mattered, I didn't answer in the abstract. I told them about high-level brand partnership meetings in which film studio executives landed seven-figure promotion deals based on their persuasive pitches. That was not a lesson I could have taught from a textbook.

But connecting with my students didn't save me from being surplused during my second year. To be fair, the administrators at Johnson said they didn't want to surplus me, but they had no choice.

One day after school, my principal gave me the news — and a paper to sign acknowledging I was being surplused. It was extremely awkward. "What if I don't sign?" I asked before I clumsily added, "Just kidding." Joking aside, the surplus process is complicated, and exactly who among the surplused gets laid off first is worked out in the contract between Clark County School District (CCSD) and the Clark County Education Association, aka the teachers union. One of the main factors is seniority — or, in my case, lack of it.

I have no problem with seniority protections. Teachers who've spent decades in a district deserve security. They've earned it. The problem is what happens at the edges, when a system designed to protect teaching experience and privilege career longevity ends up eliminating the people it most recently recruited. 

According to the email I received from CCSD in April, 418 educators were surplused in Clark County. Roughly 300 open positions were available in the district to absorb those surplused teachers. 

I attended a virtual meeting on April 15 and watched my future take shape on a spreadsheet with those 300 slots. I was number 267 on the seniority list. The three English secondary positions — the ones I was qualified for — were snapped up within the first hour. I was one of 62 CCSD employees subject to "reductions in force" from that round of surpluses.

(Shortly before this was published, I received an offer from the school district to teach drama at Jo Mackey Academy. The district also sent an update stating that only six out of those 62 marked for "reductions in force" ultimately lost their jobs, but there might still be opportunities for them. I'm grateful and excited to continue my teaching career in Las Vegas, even if the uncertainty and anxiety of the surplus process was frustrating.)

And yet, if I could do it all over again, I would. Teaching has had its highs and lows and countless surprises, but I find it deeply satisfying. My first year was at Dell H. Robison Middle School, a Title I school in Las Vegas where I taught seventh grade English Language Arts. I had an English degree from UCLA and 15 years of entertainment industry experience. None of it prepared me for what I walked into. I quickly discovered that students struggle with so much more than exams or homework assignments.

There were fights — more than I could count. There was a student who wore an ankle monitor to class and had regular court dates. There was an assault in my classroom. I handled it. And I kept teaching.

There was a student who asked to use the bathroom every day without fail. He lived in a trailer with his grandmother. No bathroom at home — he used the one at Planet Fitness. I let him go every day without question.

One of my best students — accelerated — confided in me that she had sold marijuana in sixth grade at a strip mall near her house.

These were seventh graders.

I kept going. In my second year, teaching eighth grade at Johnson's IB program across town, things clicked. It was the year I finally understood what I was doing and why it worked. That was the year I found my classroom — and the year I lost it.

There is something quietly devastating about the timing. A student mentioned to me that there were teachers who'd been at Johnson for 20 years without ever receiving a Teacher of the Month award. I had been there for three months. I had never been selected as anything "of the month" in my life. 

The photograph of me in the quad was included in a weekly email distributed to the entire Johnson community. Every family with a student at the school saw it. Young people, 12 and 13 years old, who (trust me) have no incentive to flatter anyone, decided that what was happening in that room deserved acknowledgement.

Two months later, I was told my position was being eliminated.

Some of my students still email me. They invite me to their performances. The ones who called themselves "the worst" — they check in too.

What I want Nevada's education policymakers to understand is that the investment in teachers does not end after recruitment and training. When the state builds a pipeline to bring career changers into classrooms but the seniority system practically guarantees they're the first to leave, it produces a specific result: Experienced professionals who've just cleared the hardest part of learning to teach — year one, sometimes year two — are cycled out right when they're beginning to become effective.

There is a fix that does not require dismantling seniority protections. It could be something like a retention buffer that gives preferred status to teachers who have cleared the two-year threshold and have proved themselves through administrator evaluation, student achievement data or program placements such as IB or Advanced Placement. This is easy to create and would prevent cases such as mine — teachers with student-nominated awards who are now looking for work in other districts or states because their own has no way to keep them.

Despite this setback, I'm still committed to my new vocation, and I often think about what's ahead: the students I'll meet, the inspiring classroom discussions we'll have, those "teachable moments" that make it all worthwhile.

But I also think about that photograph, the smile on my face, the badge around my neck. I look like a man who had found his place.

Ira Jason Kahn is a licensed Nevada educator completing the Alternative Route to Licensure program.