Ian Whitaker / Las Vegas Sun
Students in the packed fifth-grade classroom of teacher Vanessa Whitley on Friday, March 6, 2015, at Twitchell Elementary School.
Monday, Nov. 25, 2019 | 2 a.m.
Nevada’s decades-old education funding plan was long seen as a relic of its time, incapable of meeting the demands of a state whose demographics had changed and whose population had increased significantly since its implementation.
During the 2019 legislative session, lawmakers led by state Sens. Joyce Woodhouse, D-Henderson, and Mo Denis, D-Las Vegas, passed a bill to overhaul the formula for the first time since 1967. State officials are now working to implement the changes.
“I know we do important things here,” Denis said on the Senate floor during the passage of the bill. “But this is one of those things that is going to change people’s lives for generations. We know that our children are our future. I believe that this will start something that will help us as we move forward.”
The bill created the 11-member Commission on School Funding, which will implement the rollout of the new funding plan and make recommendations to lawmakers on what is needed for the plan. The commission, which has met several times, must make recommendations to Gov. Steve Sisolak and the Legislature by Dec. 1, 2020.
The commission will review the base per-pupil funding amount, including the multipliers for certain student groups. For example, the school district will likely receive more per-pupil funding for a student with increased needs, such as those whose first language isn’t English. The commission will also review reports from the Department of Education detailing the people and services the average school could have based on the Governor’s and Legislature’s budgets.
This plan won’t go into effect until the 2021-2023 biennium, and the commission will work toward making sure lawmakers have the correct information to implement the rollout.
“That’s why the timeline is tight, because they need to have all of this information about it now so that everyone is prepared,” Woodhouse said.
Sisolak selected UNLV visiting scholar Karlene McCormick-Lee to chair the commission, while Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro, D-Las Vegas, and Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson, D-Las Vegas, each picked two members. Senate Minority Leader James Settlemeyer, R-Minden, and Assembly Minority Leader Robin Titus, R-Wellington, selected one member each. The association of superintendents selected four members.
The state’s education funding is determined through the Nevada Plan, which went into effect in 1967 and is the oldest education funding formula in the country. Changes in the state’s population — there are more children in the Clark County School District now than there were residents of Las Vegas in 1960 — and the services provided by schools now that there are larger student populations with more varied needs led critics to see the Nevada Plan as an outdated model.
The Pupil-Centered Funding Plan passed during the 2019 session is based on per-pupil funding, which gives more money to schools per pupil with increased needs.
“I am so impressed with the number of questions, the quality of the questions that the commissioners are asking and the additional presentations that they’ve been asking for,” Woodhouse said.
The state Board of Examiners recently approved a $200,000 contract with each Applied Analysis, APA Consulting and WestEd to help in the rollout of the plan.
Applied Analysis, for example, will work on “assisting the Department and the Commission on School Funding with the validation of the funding model/methodology and analyzing the economic impact on the Department, individual school districts and the State Public Charter School Authority.”
The commission will next meet Dec. 19-20.
“At this point in time, we just have to let the Commission do its work … and they’re hard at work on it, and that makes me very pleased,” Woodhouse said.
