The Clark County School Board voted unanimously on Thursday to offer the superintendent job to state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jhone Ebert, elevating an administrator with deep roots in the district and more than five years of top-level experience overseeing the state’s education department over an out-of-state candidate and a charter school leader. 

It’s the first major action for the new board, which includes four elected trustees who joined the body this year. The next step is for the board to negotiate a contract for Ebert and vote on the contract at a future board meeting. 

The nation’s fifth-largest school district has been without a permanent superintendent since last February, when former Superintendent Jesus Jara resigned after leading the state’s largest school district for nearly six years. 

Ebert, who has served as the state superintendent of public instruction since 2019, beat out two other finalists  — Nevada State High School CEO Jesse Welsh and Michigan school district Superintendent Ben Shuldiner. 

Ebert is taking over the district in the middle of the ongoing legislative session where lawmakers will determine how much funding to appropriate to K-12 education and as President Donald Trump’s administration works to dismantle the Department of Education and has proposed cuts including slashing federally funded school meals programs, which could have sweeping consequences for the district of 300,000 students and other schools statewide. 

In addition, the district continues to face challenges such as chronic student absenteeism and low math and reading proficiency scores, issues that were exacerbated during the pandemic.

Trustee Isaac Barron said Ebert’s experience and leadership will be crucial as the district navigates this “crisis situation.” 

“We're going to need a leader who brings stability,” he said. “We need a leader who can actually have a relationship, a bipartisan relationship, with our state leaders, with our governor. [She] has cultivated that, and she has respect.”

Ebert’s priorities

Ebert began her career as a math teacher in the district, where she spent 25 years climbing the ranks to become magnet school director, assistant superintendent and chief innovation and productivity officer.

After leaving CCSD, she went on to serve as the New York State Education Department’s senior deputy commissioner for P-20 (preschool through college) education policy before returning to Nevada.

During a Monday interview with reporters, Ebert said that despite the historic increase in K-12 education funding made during the 2023 legislative session, Nevada’s average pupil funding of about $13,000 still remains $4,000 below the national average. 

“Our teachers work extremely hard in Nevada,” she said. “They are not provided with the same resources nor the same pay.”

But she said the funding has already helped the state recruit 1,200 more teachers and increase retention by 30 percent. 

“And so that data is already showing that by investing in education, we’ll have teachers in the classroom which will generate more gains,” she said. 

Asked how she would help students who fell behind after the pandemic, Ebert said the school day and the school year need to be extended. 

“We also need to make sure that we’re very intentional with the resources that we have that the students receive after school tutoring,” she said. “It’s going to take more than just one summer school session to get them back on track.”

During her second interview with the board, Ebert said she would advocate to lawmakers in Carson City to continue a funding source that the district and the Clark County Education Association (CCEA) used this year for incentive pay to fill special education teacher positions and teaching positions at Title I schools with vacancy rates of at least 5 percent.

CCEA Executive Director John Vellardita said in an interview last week the extra pay was successful in reducing vacancies among special education teachers by 26 percent, and at certain Title I schools by 53 percent. 

Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas) introduced a bill (AB398) to address that issue this week. The bill, which he worked on with CCEA, doesn’t set a specific amount of money that the Legislature should appropriate for additional compensation for hard-to-fill positions, instead leaving it up to lawmakers to determine what amount would be sufficient. 

During Ebert’s second interview with the board, Trustee Lorena Biassotti, a former member of the conservative parental rights group Mom for Liberty, asked finalists if they would preemptively agree to remove programs focused on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and a district policy supporting students with diverse gender identities such as transgender students. It comes after  Trump’s executive order aimed at removing so-called “gender ideology” from K-12 schools and another focused on cutting federal funding for DEI programs. 

The district policy follows a 2017 bill, SB225, that was signed into law by Republican then-Gov. Brian Sandoval and requires all public schools, including charter schools, to address “the rights and needs of people with diverse gender identities or expressions.”’

In February, the Nevada Department of Education, which Ebert currently heads, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal it’s working with the Nevada Attorney General’s Office and school districts to evaluate what those orders mean and how they should respond. 

Ebert said she would follow the law and district policy set by the school board. If the board ever considered changing its policy, she said she would provide them all the details it needs to make an informed decision.

”I may agree or disagree, that is no matter,” she said. “I’m going to provide you, just like I do with the governor, just like I do with 63 legislators … all the information they need.”

Shuldiner was ranked as the top choice for the job and Ebert as the second choice in separate surveys by the district and the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance. 

CCEA and the National Education Association of Southern Nevada (NEA-SN), the local affiliate of the Nevada State Education Association, didn’t endorse any of the finalists leading up to Thursday’s meeting. 

NEA-SN President Vicki Kreidel said she hopes whoever the board picks “can repair the damage done by Dr. [Jesus] Jara.” 

Jara left the district a year ago after a six-year term marked by a pandemic, tension with the board, union contract battles and a fight over his severance package.

CCEA said in a Wednesday statement it will be crucial for the next superintendent to “be effective in playing the long game based on continuous engagement at both the local and state levels with established connections and trust.”

“The bottom line in education is that making a change is not a light switch, nor is it done in a vacuum,” CCEA said in the statement.