Editorial: Governor stiffs education

Thursday, May 31, 2007 | 7:21 a.m.

I n announcing his candidacy for governor in September 2005, Jim Gibbons proclaimed that education would be his top priority. What a crock.

As governor since January, all Gibbons has been talking about is keeping his asinine campaign pledge to not raise taxes or fees. It's all that is important to him. So important that he threatened to veto the Legislature's budget if it included the tiniest increase, even a long-planned 0.02 percent increase in the business tax, for example.

For education, this meant a budget agreement among both houses of the Legislature and Gibbons, announced Tuesday, that provides only a minuscule increase for education. The increase is so small - about $63 million - that it will not budge Nevada from its ignominious position as the worst state in the country for per-pupil spending.

Many in the Legislature are hailing the agreement as an occasion for congratulations all around, as if any increase at all in the Gibbons era is a tremendous victory.

That is a disgrace. The Legislature should have coalesced around a veto-proof education budget that put Nevada's students above Gibbons' ideology.

In December the Clark County School Board endorsed a proposal by the state's 17 school district superintendents to increase education funding by $1 billion. An increase approximating that amount - even if spread over two or three legislative sessions - would realistically approach the statewide need.

The need is especially pronounced in Clark County, where average scores on national proficiency tests are shameful, where classes after third grade are woefully overcrowded and where the district is hundreds of teachers short every year largely because starting salaries are so low.

In their analysis of the need, the superintendents recommended nearly $160 million for full-day kindergarten at all of the state's elementary schools. The budget agreement calls for just $15 million, leaving dozens of grade schools with no hope of acquiring this program for years.

If the agreement holds, Gibbons will crow about keeping his campaign pledge - the one about no tax increases, not the one about making education his top priority.