Road map for school funding pushed

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Monday, Dec. 6, 2004 | 10:59 a.m.

The state's 17 school districts have teamed up for iNVest '05: a $646 million proposal for new programs, services and incentives to improve the cause of public education in Nevada.

The proposal, unveiled this weekend at the State Board of Education meeting in Las Vegas, calls for a wealth of initiatives including 3 percent pay hikes for teachers, full-day kindergarten programs and a doubling of the amount of money spent on students for whom English is not their native language.

The first iNVest plan was brought to lawmakers during the 2003 legislative session, with about a third of the $879 million in proposed programs winning funding.

The updated plan seeks to continue some of those initiatives, including $50 per student for textbooks and additional funding to cover inflationary costs and employee health insurance.

There have also been several revisions, including expanding the request for full-day kindergarten programs from just at-risk schools serving low-income families to all students statewide. That raised the projected biennium price tag to $72 million from $15.2 million.

"I'm willing to bet there will be an iNVest '07 and iNVest '09," said Clark County Schools Superintendent Carlos Garcia. "This is a strategic plan, a road map of where we should be going. No one ever said it would all be accomplished in one or two legislative sessions. What's we are saying is if people want top-notch, quality public education, this is what it's going to take to get it."

The plan calls for $60.85 million for English Language Learner programs, serving the fastest-growing student population in the state. Nationally, the percentage of students for whom English was a second language grew 73 percent between 1992 and 2002. In Nevada, the percentage of ELL students soared 457 percent between 1994 and this year, and 517 percent in Clark County alone.

Helping ELL students has already yielded benefits for the district as a whole, Garcia said. Students who transitioned out of the ELL program and into general classrooms outscored their English-only classmates across the board on standardized tests last year.

"Raising their (the ELL students) achievement means in the long run we're also raising the district's overall performance," Garcia said. "Given the challenges of (the federal) No Child Left Behind (Act), those kinds of statistical gains are critical."

Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins, D-Henderson, said it's too early to speculate as to proposal's potential for success when the 2005 Legislature gets to work in February.

"We can't begin having those kinds of discussions until we know what our revenues are going to be," Perkins said. "What I will say is that full-day kindergarten is a very high priority on my list, and the lion's share of any windfalls need to go to public education."

Perkins praised the superintendents' and school boards' associations for promoting the iNVest plan as a long-term goal rather than a wish list confined to a single legislative session.

"One of the challenges we've had is that in Nevada we budget in two-year cycles and that makes it difficult to get people to think about building multi-year plans," Perkins said. "They (the iNVest plan supporters) are very wisely looking toward the larger future."

Dottie Merrill, spokeswoman for the Washoe County School District, said the iNVest '05 plan was developed

"All of the initiatives support three tenets: improving student achievement, providing adequate basic support to schools and attracting and retaining a high-quality workforce," Merrill said Saturday. "This isn't a wish list; it's a blueprint for the success of our schools and Nevada's future."