Tuesday, March 11, 2025 | 7:25 a.m.
The finalists for Clark County School District superintendent promised they would be transparent and collaborative with constituents if appointed to the top job, they said during a community forum on Monday.
Questions submitted to forum moderators suggested that previous administrations had left employees, families and other observers wary of CCSD’s communication skills.
Jhone Ebert, Nevada’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction, said during the community meeting at Rancho High School that she knows she wouldn’t please everyone, but everyone needs to be heard and she considers outreach part of the onboarding process.
“The good news is, is that I know a lot,” said Ebert, who built a 25-year-deep professional background in CCSD before moving into state-level regulatory leadership. “The bad news is, I don’t know everything. So it will take going out to the community, sitting with teachers, sitting with community members, sitting with faith-based organizations, nonprofits. We are a very large community. It will take myself and my entire team to go out and sit and listen, and sometimes it’s hard to listen to what people say. That’s OK.”
Jesse Welsh, who is the CEO of the charter Nevada State High School chain and also a longtime previous CCSD teacher and administrator, said trust has to be built over time by being consistently open and proactive.
“A lot of times we are flat-footed and have people create the narrative for us. We need to be able to own the message, even if it’s a message that maybe we don’t want to have to put out there,” he said. “If we’re talking about, hey, we’ve got budget cuts, we need to be able to say, yes, we have budget cuts, here’s the why, here’s what we’ve done about it, and be ahead of that, as opposed to kind of having it happen quietly, and then letting people fill in that narrative.”
Welsh said there should be regular opportunities for two-way communication — talking to parents instead of at them. He suggested creating a kind of central parent council, a resource he had at the Phoenix-area school district where he served as superintendent between his tenures with CCSD and Nevada State High School.
Ben Shuldiner, the superintendent of Lansing School District in Michigan and the only finalist without a prior connection to CCSD, said that the superintendent has to be available.
While the Lansing School District only has about 10,000 students, he said he heard plenty of public feedback while on the board of the New York City Department of Education, where he was previously also a teacher and principal. With about a million students, New York City’s school district is the largest in the country and one of few that can dwarf CCSD.
“You listen, you treat them with respect. You take notes, and when you’re done, say thank you. That’s it. You take the slings and arrows. That’s the job,” Shuldiner said. “If people are angry, you’ve got to respect them. Because who do I serve: The kids. I serve the community. And if I’m hiding, you might as well just fire me.”
The finalists agreed that visiting schools — CCSD has more than 350 within its sprawling boundaries — is how to get the pulse of district needs. And they agreed that staffing is one of the district’s biggest challenges. CCSD had more than 700 posted teacher jobs as of this week.
To close academic achievement gaps — where some student groups perform notably better than others — Shuldiner said “there are some really low-hanging fruit things that the district has to do in order to move forward.”
“You’ve got to make sure that teachers are in the room,” he said. “You’ve got to make sure there’s tutors. You’ve got to be sure there’s mentors.”
Welsh said that “climate and culture” is a major issue, and leadership all the way up to the main office needs to use emotional intelligence to improve morale and candor.
“It really does start at the top, and we need to model the expectations that we have of others,” he said.
Ebert said that in addition to staffing, academic proficiency and community partnerships are CCSD’s biggest challenges.
“Those pieces all coming together will move the district forward in a very short period of time,” she said.
The selection process continues today with final school board interviews. Finalists will mingle with administrators and union representatives when not before the board. The interviews are open to the public and begin at 5 p.m. at the board headquarters, 2832 E. Flamingo Road.
The board plans to announce its pick on Thursday evening.