Thursday, June 1, 2023 | 2 a.m.
Schools in Nevada
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Rowan Costello goes to school in Ely, a rural town in east-central Nevada that isn’t too small or isolated for the schools to have hard lockdown drills.
But unlike the schools in urban centers like Las Vegas, Ely’s David E. Norman Elementary is 114 years old. In addition to being dilapidated for lack of funding to keep it modernized, it was not designed with contemporary crime like mass shootings in mind, said Adam Young, the superintendent of the White Pine County School District. Several exterior doors allow direct access.
Rowan, who attends Norman, also knows this.
“One day I heard a voice over the intercom, ‘LOCKDOWN!’ … I thought it was an actual shooting. ‘I’m glad this time, it was a drill,’ I think to myself,” the fifth-grader wrote in an essay persuading legislators to fund new schools. “Our school is not safe because we have so many doors and some of them are unlocked, so someone could come right in and invade the building.”
A bill heard Wednesday in the Nevada Assembly would allow rural counties like White Pine County, where Ely is the county seat, to raise property taxes to build replacements for aging public schools.
Assembly Bill 519 allows property tax hikes for new schools in every county except for Washoe and Clark; in Elko County, it requires them, and also allots $64.5 million to rebuild a school in Owyhee on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation.
The bill also seeds the account with $50 million, $25 million of which would be set aside for schools on tribal land.
In Nevada’s other rural counties, county commissioners would set the tax rates to raise what they determine would cover the costs of a new school. The proceeds would go into a state pot called the Account to Assist Rural School Districts in Financing Capital Improvements, then parceled back out.
It’s another swing at funding for White Pine, as a state Senate bill introduced in February directly allocating $60 million for a new elementary-middle school in Ely has stalled. The Senate bill is what essays from Rowan and other students promoted and that Superintendent Young said would most promptly and sufficiently cover their needs, although Young said he wouldn’t say no to the Assembly bill.
“We’re going to be a fan of anything that’s going to give us additional opportunities,” Young said in support of AB 519, by phone during a stop en route to Carson City.
Young, his middle-school assistant principal, and a few school board members and parents were chaperoning about 15 students on a 320-mile school bus ride to the capital to follow up on the essay-writing campaign.
They waited for hours to speak to the Assembly Ways & Means, hoping to get their Ely-specific bill a hearing.
“Our school is old and falling apart, it doesn’t have things that are required to be safe, and isn’t accessible to all people,” said Catie Murphree, a middle-schooler. “Our school has good memories, but being built in 1913, which is before World War I, makes it dangerous.”
Krosby Cox, an amputee, backed this up when she said she has gotten her prosthetic leg caught in potholes in the stairs.
“It was not fun,” she said.
In addition to outdated security designs, both Norman Elementary, built in 1909, and White Pine Middle, built in 1913, are plagued by asbestos-packed floors and walls, antiquated heating and cooling systems, cracked foundations and water damage. The schools lack fire sprinklers and parking spots.
And the cash-strapped White Pine County School District, which only has one elementary, one middle and one high school in Ely, can’t do anything to build new schools because it is at its property tax cap.
The current high school campus was built in 1995 using bond funds. The district will be paying off the debt until 2034, and even then, will only be able to bond for another $15 million when an elementary-middle school would cost at least an estimated $60 million today.
The 600 children who attend Norman Elementary and White Pine Middle might not know about funding mechanisms, but they know what they experience.
In person or in writing, they shared it with lawmakers.
Rowan wrote about asbestos and the anxiety of a possible shooting compounded by the building design.
Addison Pekuri, a middle school student, wrote about a stranger and her dog loitering inside the school for two hours before being spotted, and the “relief” of taking a health sciences elective at the modern high school.
Levi Hanson, who has asthma, wrote about how his teacher brought in an air purifier because the elementary school’s poor air circulation can trigger his breathing problems.
Kambrie Ewell, an elementary schooler, wrote about how every student has a Chromebook, and how her teacher demonstrated fractions through brownie recipes, which they applied by baking their treats in the microwave oven.
But, Kambrie added, the school also has broken and flickering lights in the bathroom, “straight out of a horror movie;” rattling, barely operational heaters; and knee-skinning asphalt on a playground with no grass.
“Would you want your child to go to this school and not get the learning experience they need?” she asked.
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