By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org
    
LAS VEGAS – The Clark County Education Association – one of the nation’s largest and most self-serving teacher unions – continues to lose members at such a rapid rate that it may be facing extinction.
 
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that the CCEA’s membership rolls have “dropped by 800 people, reducing its numbers to 62 percent of Clark County public school teachers.”
 
The union must represent at least 50 percent of Las Vegas-area educators in order to negotiate on their behalf, the paper notes.
 
The membership drop can be partially explained by the shrinking number of teachers employed by Clark County schools. Just five years ago, there were 13,000 educators in the district; today, there are only 10,590 teachers, according to the Review-Journal.
 
Of those 10,590 teachers, approximately 6,566 belong to the union. If the union loses 1,271 more members, it will drop below the 50 percent mark, potentially forcing the CCEA out of business.  
 
Ironically, the membership drop is partly explained by the CCEA’s continual pay raise demands for veteran teachers. Such salary demands empty the district’s wallet and force school officials into laying off scores of younger educators. So in a very real sense, the CCEA is suffering from a self-inflicted wound.
 
Another reason for the membership slippage is that teachers are jumping ship of their own free will. A growing number of Las Vegas educators have been turned off by how the CCEA worries more about members’ paychecks than about student needs. Academic and extracurricular programs for students are often cut in order to pay the higher labor costs.
 
The CCEA also works overtime to keep undeserving teachers in the classroom.
 
Those things don’t sit well with serious educators who understand that the real mission of schools is to educate kids, not to pamper adult employees.    
 
Earlier this year, Edward Savarese – one of Clark County schools’ “New Teachers of the Year” – spoke for many frustrated educators when lambasted the union for protecting so-so senior teachers at the expense of young, effective educators.
 
“It drives me nuts how the union protects the mediocrity,” the fifth-grade teacher told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
 
We don’t know if Savarese was one of the teachers who quit the union or not. But we do know cancellations are becoming a common occurrence, thanks to an information campaign from the Nevada Policy Research Institute that guides teachers through the dropout process.
 
If the CCEA experiences a couple more bad years like this one, the union may have to fold its hand and leave the table.
 
At long last, Las Vegas students might just wind up with the winning hand.