CCSD is seeing budget cuts again. What’s next?

Parents, principals and school staff alike have been coping with the Clark County School District’s Sept. 11 announcement of an imminent districtwide budget reduction of $51.6 million.

The cuts will be the latest in the school district’s ongoing struggle to navigate declining enrollment, which has caused the district to lose more than $70 million in funding since May 2025.

Schools will bear the brunt of the latest round of cuts as principals determine how they will operate with smaller budgets.

“We’re already hearing from schools that are cutting two, three, four positions,” said Rebecca Dirks Garcia, Nevada PTA president and admin for the popular CCSD Parents Facebook page. “At the end of the day, less staff means less resources for our kids.”

How will cuts affect schools, staff?

Schools will be asked to make $29.1 million in budget cuts, more than half of the district’s expected budget reduction this fall. The remaining budget cuts will be made to the district’s central office.

The full extent of the effects of these budget cuts on schools is not yet known; each school has its own budget, and principals had until Friday to submit their budgets to the district.

Budget reductions at schools, however, can often result in staffing cuts. About 85 to 90 percent of school budgets typically go toward employee payroll expenses, according to Megan Griffard, assistant professor of educational policy leadership at UNLV.

Griffard said non-instructional workers such as guidance counselors, campus security monitors and teachers aides may see their positions cut first.

“Those noninstructional positions, they do a lot of the behind-the-scenes work that happens that helps schools run efficiently and safely,” Griffard said.

At Divich Elementary School in the northwest Las Vegas Valley, Principal Ronald Kamman took to social media on Thursday, saying that his school faced a $644,000 deficit because he has 91 fewer students than expected. The shortfall will cause Divich to cut positions for five teachers, two support staff and one assistant principal, he said.

“We will still support over 1,000 students every day and over 100 staff members,” Kamman said in a Facebook video. “We all know that Divich is an amazing place, and while these cuts do hurt, and we will miss the staff members who are gonna have to leave … we will still move forward and make this an excellent school as we strive for five stars.”

The district has said it expects to make additional staffing reductions this fall “to accommodate the decrease in the number of students we now serve.”

When teaching positions are cut due to budget constraints, affected teachers enter a surplus process that is laid out in their union’s contract. Surplussed teachers are offered jobs at schools with openings based on their credentials, with more senior teachers given priority.

If not all teachers are offered positions, the remainder will go through a reduction in force process that can lead to layoffs.

Both processes can be difficult for educators to endure, according to Jeremy Heckler, president of the National Education Association of Southern Nevada.

“They’re working at the school that they want to be at,” Heckler said. “Maybe it’s close to their house. Maybe they’ve got an administration that they like working for. Maybe it’s something else, and now they could be shipped to the other side of the valley because that’s the only open spot.”

Heckler said he believes another reduction in force is likely since far more schools seem to be cutting teacher positions rather than adding them.

“If everybody’s cutting teachers, where are they gonna go?” Heckler said. “I don’t see how we could avoid that.”

The school district last declared a reduction of force in June. No educators were removed due to the reduction in force, the district said, though roughly 70 support professionals “could not be placed in positions for which they qualified.”

The district said on Sept. 11 that it had about 160 open teaching positions, adding “we hope to place as many licensed employees as possible into those positions if they qualify.”

“Not only are you dealing with human lives and their livelihood, but also, when a teacher is eliminated, the instruction of the students that that teacher had gets absorbed by the other teachers in that content area or that grade level,” Griffard said. “It’s always hard to sell more work for the same pay.”

Why are budget cuts happening?

The school district said the cuts are caused by greater-than-expected employee costs and student enrollment decline.

Declining enrollment in the district, which has been happening for close to a decade, has been spurred by falling birth rates and a rise in public school alternatives such as charter schools and homeschooling.

The State Public Charter School Authority has grown to become Nevada’s second-largest school district, and Griffard said a lion’s share of its campuses are located in Clark County.

“We’ve seen a lot more options for school choice through the growth of charter schools, especially in Southern Nevada, and that’s harder to predict as to which families are going to choose where they enroll their kids,” Dirks Garcia said.

The district added that its strides toward retaining teachers have led to higher-than-expected payroll costs. Officials said in February that average teacher compensation this school year would be $129,350.

Budget cuts have also followed the end of pandemic-era Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) federal funding. The fund distributed $190 billion to schools and districts nationwide, but the money had to be spent before early 2025.

While it is not certain whether the end of ESSER funding is linked to current budget cuts, Griffard said, some schools may have relied too much on “carry forward money” as the federal dollars waned. She said schools can save some of their money not used in a given school year and spend it in future years.

“It’s possible (that) ESSER money went away, people relied on their carry forward money, their carry forward money is now spent and so now they’re sort of scrambling to fill the holes that they had been relying on those funds to fill previously,” Griffard said.

How are budgets made?

The school budget cycle begins the January before a school year when principals receive their enrollment estimates for the upcoming school year, Griffard said. She added that principals sometimes refer to these budgets as “Monopoly money,” since budgets are not truly finalized until the school year begins.

Near the school year’s start, schools tally their enrollment on what is colloquially called “Count Day” to determine how much state money they will receive through Nevada’s per-pupil funding formula, which is the primary way Nevada funds schools.

“CCSD then reconciles the enrollment forecast with the actual enrollment, and what they’re seeing this year is (that) even their low, low enrollment projections that they had were still a little bit too high,” Griffard said.

Each campus’ school organizational team — comprised of parents, teachers, support staff and community members — votes to approve their school’s budget. The school’s principal then must submit their budget, this year by Sept. 18.

“The school organizational team … then has to decide, based on that bucket of money that they receive, how that’s gonna be allocated, and if there’s not enough money, then they’re deciding what has to be cut,” Dirks Garcia said.

The school district said it will ask the 2027 Nevada Legislature to allow prior-year enrollment numbers to be used when creating fall budgets, rather than the current enrollment projection method. District officials said the change “would significantly reduce disruptions for students, teachers, and schools each fall.”

“It creates a lot of uncertainty and chaos in schools, especially for those where the number of projected enrollment is way, way off from what their actual enrollment is,” Griffard said of the current budget cycle process.

Dirks Garcia said she wants budget cycle changes be paired with greater education spending from the state level.

The Nevada Department of Education Commission on School Funding in June said the Silver State would need to spend $1.9 billion over the next ten years to reach the national average per-pupil funding rate.

“I get frustrated when we do short-term or Band-Aid solutions instead of addressing the real problem, which is that we don’t properly fund education, have a huge gap that we need to fill to get to adequacy, and we need to come up with a more permanent solution for budget stability,” Dirks Garcia said.