Gabe Stern / AP
Owyhee Combined School Vice Principal Lynn Manning John speaks at a press conference outside the Nevada Legislature in Carson City. on Thursday, April 27, 2023. Students, parents and tribal leaders called on Nevada lawmakers Thursday to provide funding for a new school as the public Owyhee Combined School in the Duck Valley Indian Reservation deteriorates.
Thursday, June 15, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Lynn Manning John says the new Owyhee Combined School will be not just for preschoolers through high schoolers, but infants in cradleboards and the elders who keep the traditions — a full-family, intergenerational heart for this tight-knit Indigenous community in one of the most remote stretches of Northern Nevada.
The current Owyhee school is the only school for the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation. It is more than 70 years old, rat-infested, poorly heated and cooled, and falling apart from where it stands above a toxic geothermal plume.
It comes from a different time, when non-Indigenous society believed it had to “kill the Indian to save the man,” and is far inferior to what the children need, said Manning John, the school’s assistant principal.
In about three years, officials estimate, Owyhee will have a new school building, leaving behind its rundown structure after Gov. Joe Lombardo signed a bill Tuesday giving the Elko County School District, which operates Owyhee Combined School, $64.5 million for a replacement campus.
“Like wildflowers that have lain dormant over years of drought that have not been able to thrive or meet their potential, may this school, this opportunity be the rains that bring the superbloom that nourish the brains, heart and spirits of our children,” Manning John said at the ceremonial bill signing outside the capitol in Carson City.
Assembly Bill 519 allocates the cash needed to build a new school in Owyhee, a community of about 1,000 people on the Nevada-Idaho border 100 miles north of Elko.
It also kickstarts a new funding stream for all Elko County schools and potentially for other rural schools outside the Las Vegas and Reno areas.
Elko County now must collect an additional property tax — between 1 and 25 cents on each $100 of assessed value of taxable property — to benefit the capital projects for county schools. That includes schools on tribal lands, like Owyhee.
All other counties, minus Clark and Washoe, also have the option to raise their property taxes to benefit school facilities, collecting proceeds in a new state pot called the Fund to Assist Rural School Districts in Financing Capital Improvements.
The fund starts with $50 million in seed money: $25 million for schools on tribal land and $25 million for schools not on reservations.
That can be an outlet for communities like White Pine County, in Nevada’s eastern reaches, that also have severely outdated schools and were at their property tax cap to build or remodel.
Students and educators from Ely also visited the capitol this session to appeal to lawmakers for direct funding to replace their dilapidated schools, which are more than 100 years old. Their tailored bill died after it failed to advance out of committee.
Duck Valley tribal chairman Brian Mason said his council knuckled down about five months ago to get a new school. The tribe got a lobbyist to connect with lawmakers as the biennial legislative session was about to start.
Their first effort, a bill in the state Senate tailored to Owyhee, stalled, but they kept up their energy.
In late May, with less than three weeks remaining in the legislative session, a new bill entered the Assembly with the opportunities for additional property taxes around the state added in.
When that bill, AB 519, cleared its first major hurdle, a passing vote out of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, committee chairwoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno, D-North Las Vegas wrapped Mason in a hug, he said.
“She said with a smile, ‘You didn’t trust me,’” he recounted Tuesday. “And then I smiled and thought to myself, it’s the government promising an Indian tribe something. What could go wrong?”
Mason said AB 519 recognizes the challenges of rural Nevada, especially tribal lands, and sends the message that they matter.
Monroe-Moreno said the path authorized in AB519 is a sustainable funding mechanism for all rural schools, and for tribal schools, it opens the door for more federal assistance.
The bill shows how people take care of each other, she said.
Manning John called out the names of children who had taken the six-hour journey with her from Owyhee to Carson City to stand with Lombardo as he signed the bill, and who will soon be taught and cared for in a new school: Maggie, Monica, Riley, Roman, David, Landon, Chandler and Liam, and many more.
“This new school is for you,” she said.
