Governor Lombardo said Nevada can no longer accept a lack of funding for poor school performance. However, the Governor failed to acknowledge that even after increases to education funding last session, Nevada trails the national average by more than $4000 per student. To keep pace with the plan offered by the Commission on School Funding, Nevada would need to increase per-pupil funding by about $700 every year for the next 10 years. The Governor failed to do that. Current Nevada law calls on the Governor to increase base per-pupil funding by at least the rate of inflation. The Governor failed to do that. Instead, the Governor proposed a per-pupil funding increase of just two dollars.
Of course, two dollars won't keep up with increasing costs, especially with a 3.25% PERS increase coming in July. Two dollars won’t cover most of the items on a typical first grade classroom wish list. You can find a set of Crayola markers for $2.50, but you wouldn’t be able to afford it on the Governor’s budget. In response to the Governor’s budget proposal, school districts across the state have been deliberating cuts to schools. The Governor’s proposal to enact phonics-based instruction standards in K-3 would be more compelling if elementary school reading centers weren’t being slated for closure due to budget cuts.
It gets worse. AB584 sets school districts and individual schools with high concentrations of poverty up for failure by threatening probation and state takeover if they don’t meet performance benchmarks. Study after study has shown an overwhelming correlation between low test scores and poverty. NSEA opposes negative “accountability” measures, especially when districts and schools aren’t provided resources necessary to improve student performance.
Opponents of public education point to Nevada’s struggling schools to argue for more school “choice”. But expansion of school privatization, including using underperforming schools as a pretext, will only make matters worse by siphoning away public dollars from these schools. Meanwhile, transferring public dollars to parents for private student interventions, while these same services are on the chopping block, highlights the hypocrisy of this model. Charters also aren’t the answer. Nevada has tried the wholesale conversion of neighborhood public schools to charters before, and there is no good reason to return to the failed Achievement School District model. Also, the addition of transportation dollars to the charter system means even more resources into a duplicative system. This is government waste and bad public policy. Instead, NSEA encourages support for genuine charter school accountability measures, like those contemplated in SB318 and SB460.
AB584 is anti-union, including proposals to streamline the process to fire post-probationary teachers and to institute pay for performance. Both proposals are reliant on the flawed educator performance framework and disadvantage teachers working in lower-income communities.
NSEA does support protecting school employees for good faith interventions in incidents that pose an imminent risk to the safety of pupils or staff. This is an important protection for educators who are actively engaged in ensuring school safety, and we hope this provision can be passed. Otherwise, we ask for your strong opposition to AB584.
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