Eastside school gets first $12 million of state fund created to help charters

The new state fund created to help charter schools buy, build, expand or refinance their own facilities has its first recipient.

Futuro Academy, an elementary school on Las Vegas’ east side, recently received about $12 million from the revolving Nevada Facilities Fund to purchase the building it had been leasing for the past seven years at Lamb Boulevard and Washington Avenue.

The school is in a heavily retrofitted grocery store that sat empty for years before Futuro founder, executive director and principal Ignacio Prado came along. When it opened in 2017 with a single hallway of kindergarten and first-grade classrooms, there was nothing in the area for elementary school families seeking an alternative to the Clark County School District, Prado said. It now has about 470 children in kindergarten through fifth grade.

Futuro grew into its 45,000-square-foot building over the years with a supportive landlord that helped convert a formerly derelict commercial space full of feral pigeons into a dynamic place of learning. In phases, builders added walls to partition the cavernous interior into classrooms, a kitchen and lunchroom with roomy corridors.

Prado said that Futuro officials wanted to buy it as soon as they were big enough to occupy the full building, which happened around 2022.

“Owning this building was a real watershed moment. We’ve been planning for it and trying to marshal the organization’s resources in its entire direction toward this milestone, really, since we opened,” he said.

The Nevada State Infrastructure Bank approved the Nevada Facilities Fund, a $100 million revolving loan fund, last October to assist charter schools with a need that, generally, state funding does not specifically cover for any public schools.

The Nevada Facilities Fund leverages $15 million from the infrastructure bank and $85 million in outside funding. Loan applicants are vetted by state partners Opportunity 180, a local nonprofit focused on supporting charter schools, and the Equitable Facilities Fund, a national “social impact” fund that is providing $80 million of the outside $85 million and doing the underwriting. (Private fundraising covers the remaining $5 million.)

School districts can get voter approval to sell bonds for facility upgrades. Bigger charter school chains can go directly to the bond market for facilities money, said Opportunity 180 CEO Jana Wilcox Lavin. But most charters in the state are in rented spaces, she said.

To secure the loan, Futuro had to demonstrate strong financials and consistent enrollment and academic outcomes for students in its high-needs, historically underrepresented communities — kids “who don’t have access to a ton of quality options,” Wilcox Lavin said.

She said a school in Reno and another in Las Vegas are in the due diligence stage, getting closer to landing the next two loans.

“We appreciate the State Infrastructure Bank seeing the vision here, and the state treasurer seeing the vision here, and we appreciate the support of the governor’s office and our local philanthropic partners, as well as EFF, who really saw the vision and we were able to bring this vehicle to life,” she said.

Futuro’s 30-year loan comes with a favorable 4.99% interest rate.

Anand Kesavan, CEO of the Equitable Facilities Fund, said in a statement that the loan is “innovation in action.”

“Nevada leaders decided that the status quo for students simply wasn’t good enough. They worked across the aisle, enlisted local education experts and attracted national investor capital to create a solution that not only grows high-quality schools in perpetuity, but offers a roadmap to other states who want to do the same,” Kesavan said. “Through Futuro, Nevada is showing us what the power of public-private partnership can unlock for schools, students and families.”

Futuro has 43 staffers, a robust special education program and a playground built with student input. Some of the features of the building’s former use have been practical, Prado said — the polished concrete floors are easy to clean, the exposed ductwork is readily accessible for troubleshooting, and plenty of plumbing was already in place for the multiple bathrooms a school requires.

“Every square inch of this school is used,” he said.

This milestone achieved, Prado said his next goal is to get Futuro’s charter renewed by the State Public Charter School Authority.

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