Third grade students attend a cramped class at Nevada Rise Academy Thursday, Nov. 30, 2023. The academy is located in a shared building with a church, but the schools executive director would like to purchase the property in order to expand.
Friday, Dec. 15, 2023 | 2 a.m.
Nevada Rise Academy Executive Director Justin Brecht feels like his small charter elementary school has made a home out of its rented space that doubles as a church in east Las Vegas.
But even though he has a good relationship with his landlord Paradise Church, when your landlord is also your roommate, that limits what modifications you can make to the property.
The good news, potentially, is that the church is looking to sell the campus at Desert Inn Road and Eastern Avenue and relocate. And there’s more good news: With a new state fund called the Nevada Facilities Fund now in place to help charter school operators buy, build, expand or refinance their own facilities, Nevada Rise Academy has a real shot at putting the campus in its name.
“Ideally, we’d like to acquire this as our permanent home so we can make the modifications,” Brecht said. “It’s hard to move families when you’ve established where you are and established your student population. We don’t want to disrupt where people are used to taking their kids — if wherever we would move doesn’t work, we don’t want to lose kids for that reason. And we do like this area, and we like the building.”
The Nevada State Infrastructure Bank approved the Nevada Facilities Fund, a $100 million revolving loan fund, in October to assist charter schools with a need that, generally, state funding does not cover for any public schools and is instead often funded through bonds.
The Nevada Facilities Fund will leverage $15 million from the infrastructure bank and $85 million in outside funding. Loans will be 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. (Private fundraising will cover the rest.)
Jana Wilcox Lavin, Opportunity 180’s CEO, said the loan fund is open to charters operating in, or that want to operate in, Nevada that can show strong financials and demonstrate that they impact high-needs, historically underrepresented communities.
Bigger school networks, or chains, can go directly to the bond market for facilities money, she said. Others can connect with a charter school development organization, which buys the building on behalf of a school and then leases it back to the school with a purchase option. Smaller, independent schools, like Nevada Rise, tend not to have the resources to do that.
Wilcox Lavin said most charters in the state are in rented spaces, and the Nevada Facilities Fund gives them another way to buy directly.
“At Opportunity 180, we want to ensure every kid has access to a great school in their neighborhood and is on a path to graduate college- and career-ready. We have federal funds and philanthropy that help us support the development of and launch new public charter schools in high-needs communities. That’s one separate fund,” Wilcox Lavin said. “And then what this facility fund allows us to do is support those schools as they launch.”
Wilcox Lavin said she anticipates being able to offer an interest rate of about 4.5%. She is hopeful that the first loans will be disbursed next quarter.
The governor’s office said the Nevada Facilities Fund should be able to make loans through at least 2042.
“As the largest charter school investment in state history, this investment will dramatically increase school choice opportunities in Nevada, especially in underserved communities,” Gov. Joe Lombardo said in a statement. “Coupled with our unprecedented investment into the state’s K-12 system, these funds represent our unwavering commitment to providing an education that meets the unique needs of students across the state.”
Nevada Rise opened in 2018 and has been inside Paradise Church the whole time. The site was a last-minute find, even with the two-year timeframe that Brecht, a former Clark County School District teacher, had to open the school. Because Nevada Rise had no budget for renovations, he needed a building that would already meet codes for schools. Fortunately, this building had already been home to several prior schools, including a couple of charters and the church’s own private school.
He said the school voluntarily cut its enrollment from about 500 pupils last year to about 365 this year through attrition, largely because of facility limitations.
“We were bursting at the seams,” he said. “We had kids doing small groups in hallways, outside of elevators, in between lunches, and just needed some breathing space.”
Brecht doesn’t complain, but there are realities to sharing space that wasn’t purpose-built for a school. The sanctuary for Sunday services is the school’s auditorium on weekdays. The lunchroom is the fellowship hall. Storage is limited, and there is little visible school signage or branding.
The classrooms aren’t uniform dimensions — in the third grade, where the two classes have about 30 students each, one group has a roomy space while the other uses stools because there isn’t room for chairs. There is one, single-toilet restroom for all 33 staff members. At one point, Brecht’s office was a janitorial closet.
“I could have one and a half people join me,” sitting on a makeshift bench made out of cinder blocks, he said.
There have been some improvements — the pastor is also a builder, so he modified the entrance to have a service counter for front office staff and a secure vestibule to put a layer between classrooms and the street. The school got its first set of playground equipment this year, for which there was plenty of room to the rear of the parcel. Brecht sees the school building a multipurpose room out there one day.
Paradise lead pastor Michael Matijevich said the church and Nevada Rise are friends, and he wants the school to buy the site. He appreciates a good school — “that’s why we had a Christian school for 27 years,” before the church school moved to Henderson and became Lake Mead Christian Academy. “We want to see kids learn how to think critically.”
Brecht also has visions for creating a sense of place, perhaps with murals.
“We don’t require a lot of fancy,” he said. “We just want it to make sense for what our purpose is here.”
