Nevada is near bottom in fed funds for students

Thursday, June 10, 2004 | 11:26 a.m.

There was some good news and bad news for Nevada's public schools in a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The good news: The state improved its ranking for the amount of federal education dollars received.

The bad news: Nevada only moved from last in the nation to the second-to-last spot.

The report, released Tuesday, ranked Nevada 50th in overall federal education dollars -- $427 per student for the 2001-02 fiscal year. Only New Hampshire received less, with $421 per student.

The national average was $693, with Washington, D.C., receiving the top payout of $2,067. California received $828 per student and Arizona $721.

Nevada was 51st in 2001 with $347 per pupil in federal education dollars. From 1998 to 2000, Nevada ranked 50th, just ahead of New Hampshire.

For decades Nevada has finished at or near the bottom of the national ranking for federal funding. That's something that state education officials say must come to an end.

Federal funding formulas haven't factored in rapid population growth, like the boom that has increased Southern Nevada's school enrollment by nearly 40 percent in the last five years, said Doug Thunder, deputy superintendent of fiscal services of the state Department of Education.

Nevada struggles to fund its schools because the federal government owns more than 85 percent of Nevada -- preventing the state from collecting taxes or other revenues from use or sale of the land, Thunder said.

A coalition of 12 other Western states in similar circumstances, led by Utah, has created the APPLE initiative -- Action Plan for Public Lands and Education -- a campaign to increase its share of federal education dollars. The Nevada Legislature approved a resolution in support of the initiative during the 2003 session and the state Board of Education is expected to endorse joining the coalition later this month.

Because the federal government doesn't pay property taxes for the land it uses, one of the primary funding sources for public education, school districts are paid "impact aid," intended to make up for lost revenue. Impact aid is calculated based on the number of schoolchildren whose parents live or work on military bases or who reside on Indian reservations.

Nevada received $4.8 million in impact aid for the 2001-02 fiscal year.

Impact aid based solely on enrollment of military dependents isn't enough to fully compensate schools for the lost tax revenues, Thunder said.

"We should be getting at least double what we're seeing in federal funds overall," Thunder said.

Of Nevada's total funding for elementary and secondary education in 2001-02, 5.8 percent came from federal sources, according to the Census report. Nationally 7.8 percent of states' education dollars came from federal sources.

Federal dollars typically account for between 6 percent and 8 percent of the Clark County School District's annual operating budget -- $1.6 billion for the 2004-05 fiscal year.

While more federal money would be welcome, it doesn't absolve local communities or the state of its responsibilities, Walt Rulffes, deputy superintendent of operations for the district, said.

"The feds are very clear about this -- what they give us isn't supposed to replace local dollars, it's supposed to be for things over and above what the state provides," Rulffes said.

And with more federal dollars come more strings, Rulffes said. While Nevada saw an increase in funding through the federal No Child Left Behind Act, school districts must now hit a variety of annual student achievement benchmarks or face sanctions -- up to, in a worst-case, long term scenario, takeover by the federal education department.

State and local education officials, who have lobbied aggressively for changes to the federal formula for calculating aid, scored a victory earlier this year that could boost Nevada's ranking on future Census reports.

A change in federal law, sponsored by Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., requires the Education Department to use only the latest available census figures when calculating aid to schools in high-poverty areas. Fast-growing states, such as Nevada and Arizona, were hurt by the use of outdated statistics. At the same time funding levels were protected for states that had drops in population.

The change in the law will bring Nevada an extra $6.7 million in federal Title I funds for schools serving children from low-income families for 2004-05 -- an increase of more than 20 percent.

But Title I funds account for just one slice of the federal pie. Special education, nutritional programs and vocational services and grants are also included in the total. And other states are also seeing increases, which makes it unlikely that Nevada will climb above the bottom 5 in overall federal education funding, Thunder said.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., who worked with other members of the state's congressional delegation to have the latest census figures used to calculate Title I aid, said she wants the same change applied to the rest of the federal education funding calculations.

"Nevada needs more and more dollars because we are educating more and more students," Berkley said this morning. "Either this administration has a fundamental lack of understanding of the needs of the people of Nevada or they are deliberately attempting to torpedo our educational system."

Nevada faces a "double whammy," as federal impact aid for schools educating children from military families has been steadily dropping, Berkley said.

Clark County's impact aid payment was $550,000 for the 2003-04 school year, down from $2 million in 1997, school district officials said. The number of students qualifying for the aid, in the meantime, has increased, they said.

"This is an outrage, pure and simple," Berkley said.

Gary Waters, president of the state Board of Education, said while the federal funding formulas are being debated there's some immediate action that can be taken to bring more dollars to the state's schools. Nevada needs to do a better job with both its applications for federal grants and management of funds that are awarded, Waters said.

"We have a small number of people who have the training and the time available to write these grants, which is a time-consuming and complicated process," Waters said. "Our staff structure doesn't really allow for it and that's something we're looking to change. We need to be much more aggressive about this."

The state Education Department drew criticism from Ensign earlier this year after a federal report indicated the state had failed to draw down hundreds of thousands of dollars that had been allocated. But state education officials countered that the federal report had included money that was part of multi-year grants and had intentionally been left in reserve.