White Pine County can’t afford to educate its children

Kiley Russell

Thursday, March 11, 1999 | 9:38 a.m.

CARSON CITY - School officials from remote White Pine County asked lawmakers Wednesday for $19.5 million in bond revenues to handle nearly 100 eastern Nevada students currently educated in neighboring Utah.

The 77 children face a 90-minute bus ride into Utah, partly on dirt roads, because White Pine County can't afford to build new classrooms or fix the ones they do have, legislators were told.

"We do have students we cannot provide a Nevada education to today," school superintendent Mark Shellinger told the Assembly Ways and Means Committee.

He added the state has a constitutional responsibility to provide Nevadans with a K-12 education, even if that means funding school construction - an expense usually left to counties.

"We would like to see construction funded by the state in any county where there are no other options," Shellinger said.

County officials requested AB274, requiring the state to float the multi-million dollar bond to build a new K-12 facility for 150 students in Pleasant Valley and to repairs classrooms in Lund and Ely. With that done, they said the schools could serve all the county's 2,000 school-age children.

The county, with a population of about 11,000, relies on taxes from local mines and a tax rate of 32 cents per $100 of assessed valuation on property, officials said.

"In '96-'97 we had a $217 million tax projection," said Paul Johnson, the district's financial officer. "The Department of Taxation told us 'Your $217 million estimate is $12 million too high.' That was partly through an error and partly because of local mines ... asking for a devaluation."

That cost the district about $300,000, or 3 percent of its annual budget, and officials have been trying to make up that difference ever since, said Johnson.

"There just isn't the economy to have a tax capacity to built the schools," Shellinger said.

But in a lean budget year lawmakers are wary of funding big projects, especially if the projects aren't considered part of the state's normal duties, said Assemblyman Lynn Hettrick, R-Gardnerville.

He added that sending students across state lines is not unusual for counties that can't afford to build schools. For example, Douglas County educates students from nearby California counties, he said.

Don Hataway of the state Budget Office agreed and told a school construction project is funded for one county a policy is needed for all of Nevada's 17 counties.

But the state is required by law to provide the same quality of education for all its students, regardless of where they live, said Mary Peterson, the state's superintendent of public schools. She said that currently White Pine schools are not up to standards of Las Vegas' worst inner city facilities.

"These are not decent facilities and would not meet the test for decent facilities in court," she said.