Helping make Nevada all it can be, especially when it comes to educating our children, certainly comes at an unavoidable cost, the penance we all pay for having shortchanged education for so many years. For too long, and in the absence of meaningful tax reform to better fund our schools, our children have suffered at the hands of legislators who, through lack of inventiveness or commitment, failed to prioritize education as a crucial pillar in reaching our state’s potential.
It may be a tired cliché to suggest that “it’s never been more important than now” to do this or that. But Nevada is at an important, state-changing crossroads in terms of developing the economic diversity necessary to carry us into a bright, prosperous future. Part and parcel of executing that vision is for Nevada to step up in every possible way to improve our education system, especially within the Clark County School District. We don’t want future employers to have to import workers — whether skilled in the trades or high-tech fields — from California, Arizona or Utah, when we should be nurturing our own pool of qualified workers. That nurturing begins in grade school, carries through high school and extends into our community colleges and state universities, depending on the student’s end goal in the workplace.
It is through no fault of its own that our local public school system has struggled mightily in dealing with challenges thrust upon it. Many of those challenges have to do with the number of students, whether born here or who have moved here, who are not native English speakers. We get that. But language differences can be overcome, resulting in smart and skilled students who are valued members of our community as taxpayers and as employees. In other words, students — no matter their native language — are all integral to Nevada’s future. Period.
It’s for that reason that we again applaud Gov. Brian Sandoval for the education reforms he championed and shepherded through the 2015 Legislature. Many of those efforts focused on launching children in the earliest grades onto a path to success. The entire state will benefit by their academic and workplace achievements. Investing in them will repay over and over in a multitude of ways.
Those reforms, of course, came at a cost, and the Legislature approved several funding mechanisms to pick up the tab. A small part of the $1.4 billion that Sandoval sought to pay for the education initiatives, which are intended mostly to assist children in younger grades, is to come from a new tax to be assessed against businesses making $4 million or more a year. That tax is expected to produce about $120 million every two years.
Opponents of that tax — among the most conservative and nearsighted — tried unsuccessfully to qualify a ballot measure for the November election to repeal that commerce tax. Their petition drive was derailed when a judge ruled that voters signing it weren’t advised that repealing the tax would leave the state’s budget unbalanced. There wasn’t time for these anti-school politicians to fix the flaw and relaunch their effort.
Sandoval had challenged those politicians to explain what education programs they would have cut if the tax was repealed, destroying “a generational opportunity to finally modernize and improve an underperforming education system.”
Here are the politicians who led the charge to undercut our children’s education: State Controller Ron Knecht, Treasurer Dan Schwartz and Assembly members Michele Fiore, Brent Jones, Victoria Seaman and Shelly Shelton from Las Vegas, Jill Dickman from Reno, John Ellison from Elko, Ira Hansen from Sparks, Robin Titus from Wellington, Jim Wheeler from Gardnerville — all Republicans — and Libertarian John Moore of Las Vegas. Some are seeking re-election and others are seeking promotions to higher office.
When voting in the primary, think twice before supporting someone whose ideology includes giving the bum’s rush to our children.
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