LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Early hour commuters were met with teacher protesters along Sahara Avenue on Wednesday.
Teachers, students and parents took to protesting outside Clark County School District headquarters, demanding their voices be heard and their list of demands be taken seriously by administrators. All asking for one thing — that their schools are safe for teachers and students.
For nearly two hours, more than 100 teachers, students and parents took over CCSD headquarters, making their message clear: they want safe schools.
In the crowd was Tiersa Baughman, who has been with CCSD even before she worked as an educator for them. She says she graduated from CCSD public schools and so did her two daughters. Baughman says she works in a particularly tough part of town, and she chose that area because she feels like it's highly ignored.
For most educators, it's not about a paycheck, Baughman said. They're doing it from the heart.
"If we were doing it for the paycheck, we would have left teaching a long time ago," Baughman said.
She, along with fellow educator Mercedes Krause, both have seen the violence at CCSD schools grow over the years. Krause says "you can feel things bubbling with overcrowding."
CCSD is short about 1,500 teachers, and it's really stressing staff and running them thin, Krause added.
At the rally, a list of short-term goals was established, including adding intercoms and classroom buttons and someone to man the sites where these signals go back to at all times. Teachers also advocated for adding operational surveillance cameras to every school and fixing cameras that don't work. They also asked for a district-wide policy on how to handle violence in the classrooms and a comprehensive safety plan for how to deal with violence in the schools published to the school districts website.
Some of these demands, CCSD says, are already in the works at schools like Eldorado High School and other schools soon to follow.
