LAS VEGAS – Fifteen former teachers in the Clark County, Nevada school district have filed a federal lawsuit, claiming they were improperly fired, despite receiving several consecutive years of poor performance evaluations.

Their union, the Clark County Education Association, is a partner in the lawsuit, signaling its belief that the quality of a teacher’s classroom performance should not be a factor in employment decisions.

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The teachers, who had between five and 22 years of experience in the Las Vegas-based school district, were fired during the 2013-14 school year, after receiving at least two consecutive years of poor performance evaluations, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

They were fired under terms of a 2011 Nevada state law that removed full tenure protections for consistently low performing teachers. State lawmakers finally decided that student rights to a quality education trump teacher rights to a permanent job, and passed AB 225.

Prior to that, teachers gained full tenure protection after their first two years of employment, making it very difficult to fire them.

In their lawsuit, filed June 18 in a Las Vegas federal court, the teachers and their union claim they “have suffered monetary loss, mental anguish and emotional distress as a result of the district’s termination of their employment in violation of their rights,” the newspaper report said.

There was apparently no mention in the lawsuit about how students may have suffered under the instruction of sub-par teachers. There have been no reports of students or their parents filing lawsuits seeking damages over lost educational opportunities.

If that occurred, the Clark County district might very well go broke.

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According to a 2014 study conducted by Education Week, Nevada once again finished dead last – behind the 49 other states and the District of Columbia – when it comes to students’ “chance for success” later in life, according to the Review-Journal.

The study measured the quality of education in each state by “student performance, school financing, academic standards and other qualities of public schools,” the news report said.

“It then combined the findings with others outside school — such as parents’ education level, income and language abilities — to determine children’s ‘chance for success’ in each state.”

Nevada ranked last in the study for the fifth straight year. Much of the problem was attributed to the Clark County school district, which enrolls about two-thirds of the state’s K-12 students, according to the news report.

But even those disturbing findings haven’t stopped the Clark County teachers union from going to bat for bad teachers who lost their jobs for bad teaching.

“It’s terrible,” said Victor Joecks, executive vice president of the Nevada Policy Research Institute, regarding the state’s academic performance. “The state has had the lowest graduation rate in the country for years, and Clark County is about 70 percent of the state.

“But the union is in it for the adults in the system, that’s for sure, whether they are good teachers or not.”