Courtesy photo
Built in 1909, David E. Norman Elementary in Ely has deteriorated so badly that officials are seeking $60 million from the state for a replacement school.
Monday, Feb. 27, 2023 | 2 a.m.
Nevada schools
The sole elementary and middle schools in Ely are filled with children of whom White Pine County School District Superintendent Adam Young is deeply proud.
Young raves about the roughly 600 schoolchildren in the town of about 4,000 residents about 240 miles outside of Las Vegas in central eastern Nevada.
His passion for the children, he says, keeps him up at night because the facilities where they attend school are painfully outdated.
David E. Norman Elementary and White Pine Middle schools are plagued by asbestos, antiquated heating and cooling systems, cracked foundations, water damage, and disability access that is limited at best, he detailed to the Sun.
He continued: The schools also lack fire sprinklers and parking spots.
But most stressful for Young, an Ely native, is that the schools were not designed to keep people with dark intentions from easily getting to classrooms.
Norman Elementary was built in 1909. White Pine Middle was built in 1913. They have deteriorated so badly that the school district is seeking $60 million from the state during the ongoing legislative session to get Ely replacement schools, because White Pine County — an area with less than 10,000 residents that is home to Great Basin National Park — doesn’t have the local tax base to build new campuses.
That means every winter brings obstacles to learning, such as stretch in January when the temperatures dipped to 18 degrees below zero overnight. When dawn broke, the heat at Norman Elementary was out, again.
District staff got it working and Young said it’s “limping along” — as a steam heating system in a 114-year-old building might do.
It could have been worse. Last winter, with iffy schematics to guide them, workers traced a seeping classroom floor to a decrepit pipe that was original to the school.
“When we have something like that we basically go exploring,” Young said. “We had to move this fourth-grade class into the library for a couple of weeks while one of our maintenance guys took a jackhammer to the concrete floor to try to figure out where this leak was coming from. When he found it, his words were, ‘this pipe had more holes than a flute.’ ”
Workers patched the pipe and the floor. But steam is powerful and it will find the next weak spot in the pipes to exploit in the same way.
“The laws of physics,” Young said.
The laws of property taxes are no kinder.
White Pine County is at Nevada’s statutorily capped tax rate of $3.66 per $100 of a property’s assessed value. The school district gets 25 cents of this for facilities, as there is no state funding specifically for capital projects. Those must be covered locally by issuing bonds, which work like loans.
With bonds, a school district will ask local taxpayers to increase property taxes. The district then issues and sells bonds, using the proceeds from the increased taxes to repay its bond holders, or lenders.
White Pine County School District last did this to build the current White Pine High School, which opened in 1995. Even once the district has paid off the high school’s debt — in 2034 — it will only be able to bond for another $15 million at most, Young estimated.
“There’s never, ever going to be a time — ever — when we’ll be able to bond for a new school,” he said.
Republican State Sen. Pete Goicoechea, who represents Ely and ranches cattle in western White Pine County, is proposing Senate Bill 100 that calls for the state to directly fund the $60 million that Young estimates is needed to construct a modern building for preschool through eighth grade. The combination school would be on district-owned land adjacent to the high school.
What Ely’s children have now isn’t fair, Goicoechea said.
“You can’t be in a 100-year-old building,” said Goicoechea, who, like Young, grew up in the schools of the former copper boomtown. “The heating’s not working. The air’s not working. You’ve got patches on patches.”
A feasibility study that White Pine County School District commissioned in 2015 and updated in 2021 notes that neither Norman Elementary nor White Pine Middle meets current safety codes, so if the district were to renovate, they must bring the entire school to code. Those costs are nearly the same as building new, Young said.
Additionally, each school only has one entrance accessible to people with disabilities. At White Pine Middle, which is three stories, there is no way for a person with mobility limitations to get upstairs. When a student in a wheelchair enrolls, their entire grade level stays on the ground floor for as long as the child is at the school, requiring teachers to swap classrooms.
“We’re really blessed to have supportive parents and students, otherwise this would be a lawsuit, and it probably will be someday,” Young said.
Young said the district has been trying for 20 years to get funding, whether through grants, public-private partnerships, or other legislation. He said that without the support of the Legislature and Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo this spring, he is out of ideas.
Goicoechea went to bat for Ely schools with a bill in 2021 for small rural counties to exceed the state tax rate cap just to build new schools. The bill died.
He also talked that year to state leaders, including Treasurer Zach Conine and then-Gov. Steve Sisolak, about directly funding Ely’s school construction, but said the state’s budget was too tight in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic for the project.
Goicoechea said the state is in better financial health now, and the need in Ely is dire.
“They just don’t have any room to help themselves,” he said.
