There’s something deeply unsettling about a school district that serves over 300,000 children running out of money. Not because of a natural disaster, not because of a sudden economic collapse, but because of a layered, slow-moving pile-up of structural problems, financial miscalculations, and a funding system that was already limping before crisis hit.
The Clark County School District, which runs schools across the Las Vegas metropolitan area, has become a case study in what happens when rising costs, chronic underfunding, teacher shortages, and bureaucratic missteps all collide at once. There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s dive in.
A Giant District With a Giant Problem
The Clark County School District is the fifth-largest school district in the nation. That scale alone makes financial management enormously complex. We’re talking about more than 350 schools, tens of thousands of employees, and a budget that touches nearly every corner of Southern Nevada’s economy.
CCSD approved an amended final budget of nearly $4 billion for 2025. That’s an enormous sum of money. Still, enormous doesn’t mean enough, and the events of 2024 made that painfully clear when the district publicly admitted it was staring down a significant financial shortfall.
The Shortfall That Shook the System
Here’s the thing that blindsided everyone: Nevada’s legislature had just delivered a record education budget, and yet CCSD was still running short. In October 2024, the district reported it had a $20 million shortfall before revising that number down to $10.9 million, and the shortfall raised serious questions given that the district had received a record amount of funding from state lawmakers just the prior year.
CCSD said the shortfall was due to the district failing to account for lawsuit payouts, cybersecurity expenses, and unaccounted-for pay increases. In plain terms, the people managing the books simply didn’t factor in costs they should have seen coming. Interim Superintendent Dr. Brenda Larsen-Mitchell acknowledged that errors in the budget were caused by “mistakes” and that “the mistakes were preventable.”
A Salary Calculation That Went Badly Wrong
One of the most avoidable pieces of the crisis was a basic math error in how employee salaries were projected. In January 2024, the district projected the average licensed employee salary at about $115,000, but that estimate later came out to about $121,000, a difference of roughly $5,700 per employee. Multiply that across thousands of staff members, and you have a massive, compounding gap.
In January 2024, the projected budget had failed to include the eight percent raises agreed to in December with the Clark County Education Association teachers union, and had also used the incorrect formula for at-risk funding. Two errors at once. It’s the kind of double miscalculation that should trigger serious questions about internal oversight.
The CFO Gets Fired, the State Steps In
When the financial mess surfaced, accountability came fast. The Clark County School District faced corrective action over budgeting issues that caused problems for the 2024-25 school year, and the district admitted to budget miscalculations that led to the firing of its chief financial officer, Jason Goudie, in September.
The state’s response was firm. The Nevada Department of Education ordered CCSD to develop a corrective action plan in coordination with an appointed compliance monitor and submit it by December 27, 2024, and to begin implementation of the state-approved plan by January 9, 2025. The corrective action plan identified three root causes, including a lack of accountability, monitoring, and protocols with the previous budget.
Nevada’s Chronic Underfunding Problem
Honestly, it would be unfair to pin this entire crisis on internal mismanagement alone. Nevada has a deep, longstanding funding problem that precedes any single budget cycle. Nevada ranks 46th in the nation for education spending at $11,673 per student, far below top-spending states like New York at $30,012, according to Census Bureau data.
The per-pupil funding in Nevada is $4,000 less than the national average. That gap doesn’t just affect what teachers earn or what materials schools can buy. It shapes everything. Nevada’s K-12 schools consistently rank among the worst in the nation for proficiency levels in English and math, high school graduation rates, and per-pupil funding. The money problem and the outcomes problem are inseparable.
The ESSER Cliff Nobody Wanted to Talk About
School districts across the country were given a financial lifeline during the pandemic in the form of federal ESSER funds. But that lifeline was always temporary. The final round of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds was set to end, as states had to commit the funds by September 2024, and ESSER funds account for a significant share of current education dollars, which puts schools at risk of shortfalls when these funds lapse.
High-poverty districts in states with progressive funding systems will be better protected from the absence of ESSER funds than high-poverty districts in regressive states, such as Nevada. Let that sink in. Nevada was among the states least positioned to absorb the loss of federal relief money. The fiscal cliff that education advocates had been warning about wasn’t a prediction. By 2024, it was already happening.
Teacher Shortages Are Draining the Budget Too
Recruiting and retaining teachers costs money. A lot of it. A 2024 report by the Nevada Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights examined educator shortages statewide, noting that in 2022-23, there were 2,922 vacancies out of 30,491 teacher and professional staff positions statewide, creating a vacancy rate of 9.6 percent.
Of the district’s 700 teacher vacancies, 570 are concentrated in Title I schools, according to Interim Superintendent Brenda Larsen-Mitchell. That imbalance means the schools serving the most vulnerable students are also the most understaffed. Recruitment trips that CCSD officials took over the last year cost taxpayers over $150,000. Filling empty classrooms doesn’t come cheap, especially when other districts are offering higher pay.
Special Education: A Growing Cost the Budget Can’t Absorb
Special education is one of the fastest-growing cost centers in large school systems, and CCSD is no exception. About 14.5 percent of CCSD students receive special education services. That is a substantial portion of the student population, each requiring individualized support under federal law.
Clark County School District is in a tough spot because there simply aren’t enough special education teachers to go around, and when the 2025 school year began, 163 special education positions were vacant, leaving many kids with disabilities without the support they count on. A class action lawsuit filed by parents against CCSD and the Nevada Department of Education in 2024 claimed that the district left special education students without the services required under federal law. Legal costs layered on top of staffing costs. The numbers spiral quickly.
Enrollment Swings and the Funding Formula Trap
Nevada’s school funding model is tied closely to student enrollment counts. That sounds reasonable in theory. In practice, it creates real chaos when enrollment numbers shift. There were changes between the budget estimates that schools received in January 2024 and the actual fall budgets received in September 2024, with enrollment changes, salary increases, and a correction of an allocation resulting in some schools unexpectedly receiving both less money and higher payroll costs.
Schools saw changes to their budgets because of enrollment numbers and salary increases that were not reflected in the spring 2024-2025 strategic budget allocation. It’s a bit like budgeting for a road trip based on last year’s gas prices, then filling up and discovering everything cost more than expected. The problem is, when schools run short, real people pay the price. Despite CCSD’s claims that individual schools were not impacted by the central budget deficit, many schools had to cut staff and programs due to inaccurate budgeting.
Where Things Stand Now and What’s Next
CCSD has been working to pull itself out of the mess it found itself in during 2024. In the fall, CCSD initially estimated a potential deficit of $20 million before lowering it to $10 million, and ultimately ended the fiscal year with no deficit after using money from its ending fund balance. A narrow escape, not a solution.
The Clark County School Board unanimously approved a nearly $4 billion budget for fiscal year 2026. Looking further ahead, the 2025 legislative session secured $12.9 billion for K-12 funding for the 2025-27 biennium and increased the base per-pupil funding to $9,414, representing a five percent increase with additional weights prioritizing at-risk students. It’s progress. Whether it’s enough to keep a district this large from hitting another wall remains the real question.
