Several years ago the Nevada State Education Association attempted to put on the ballot a measure to fund education in Nevada at the national average. It is still a sad state of affairs that we have to fight just to be average but I commended their actions. So far, our State Legislature has continued to fail to provide adequate funding for our children.
In numerous states, school districts have brought legal actions against their state legislatures for insufficient funding as required by their state constitutions. That is also an option available to our local school districts but they apparently don’t want to confront our state legislature on behalf of our children. But the issue is ripe for review.
This avoidance of confrontation was shown by the Board of Trustees of the Washoe County School District when they didn’t object to the Legislature adopting unfunded educational mandates. The State Legislature adopted laws to comply with Federal requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) but they left out a critical provision.
Somewhere around page 1100 of NCLB it states that if the Federal government doesn’t provide adequate funding for NCLB then the states don’t have to do it. The Board was informed of this provision by their counsel. You think someone on the Board of Trustees would bring this up to the legislature and attempt to include this provision in state law but they were to caught up in pleasing our legislative leaders who naively wanted Nevada to comply with this unprecedented federal intrusion into state government.
When NCLB was adopted, Congress estimated it would cost 16 billion dollars nationally to implement the law. After they were done patting themselves on the back for being pro education, Congress didn’t tell us that they only were going to appropriate 12 billion, a 25% shortfall. Now the actual shortfall is even higher according to the National School Boards Association. Districts nationally are getting only about one dollar out of seven that they need to comply with the law. Hopefully President Obama will repeal the law.
We can’t challenge the Federal law here in Nevada because we made it a state law. You think our state leaders would know that Washington would fail to provide us with adequate funding as they have for years with special education. The education funding in Nevada is archaic and insufficient to meet the needs of our children. It is sad that our state and local leaders are putting us further behind with insufficient funding.
So we are now waiting to see what the legislature will do for our children in the next two years. I am sure we won’t move up on the national list on per pupil funding amounts. We probably will go down and the reason will be “a lack of money.” Well that is no excuse. Other states don’t have money and pay more for their children.
If the legislature feels that our children are important then give them the money they need. Otherwise talk of putting our children first is just all talk.
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