CARSON CITY — A crumbling tribal school that was the subject of widespread community outcry is set to be replaced after Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo signed into law funding for a new facility on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the governor also signed two bills related to transgender rights and vetoed another.
Flanked by tribal leaders and dozens of students who traveled to the state Capitol from a reservation in a remote swath of northern Nevada, Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo signed the legislation that funds both a new school and opens new mechanisms for tribal and rural school funding across the state.
“I’m so proud of the youth for making these long trips, meeting with legislators and making this a true learning experience,” said Brian Mason, chairman of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation.
The public Owyhee Combined School on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation hosts 330 students from pre-K through 12th grade along the Nevada-Idaho border. The Shoshone-Paiute Tribes on the reservation have about 2,000 members, nearly all of whom have attended the school built in 1953.
Hundreds of tribal members visited the Nevada Legislature in April, where they pleaded for new school funding.
They described a bat colony living in the ceiling, where drippings ebb into the home economics room. Stray bullet holes have remained in the front glass windows years after they appeared. The school is a stone’s throw from a highway, where passersby sometimes use the school bathroom as if it’s a rest stop.
Perhaps most hazardous is the school’s location, which sits adjacent to toxic hydrocarbon plumes that lie under the town. Tribal doctors are preparing a study in relation to a noticeable string of cancer deaths.
“Our current facility, designed and built at a time of the policy of ‘kill the Indian and save the man,’ no longer serves us,” said Vice Principal Lynn Manning-John at the bill signing. “For our future of our tribe, and for us as individuals, this new school promises hope.”
The new school will take about three years to build, Lombardo said.
Sponsored by Democratic Assemblywoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno, the bill allocates $64.5 million for a new Owyhee Combined School and also creates other funding mechanisms for other tribal and rural schools. Rural Elko County, which has jurisdiction over the Owyhee school, has just over a year to decide whether to pay an additional property tax for or divert part of its revenues for a school district capital fund.
The bill gives other rural counties’ board of commissioners the option to raise property taxes to help fund capital projects for schools on tribal land. It also creates an account of $25 million for capital projects for schools and another $25 million specifically for schools on tribal land.
One school that could benefit from the bill is Schurz Elementary School, on the Walker River Reservation in rural Mineral County. Walker River Paiute Tribe Chairwoman Andrea Martinez originally advocated for the bill when it only included the funding for the Owyhee School, but became more involved when it was widened to include more rural and tribal schools.
“For our culture, we think about the next seven generations. And the people that put in the work to do this, that’s where their mindset is,” Martinez said. “It makes me happy to see that’s where our mindset is now, instead of trying to just survive the systemic injustices we’ve been facing.”
Teresa Melendez, a tribal lobbyist and organizer who worked on the bill, said some tribal leaders and principals are considering a feasibility study to create a new tribal school district for a more cohesive funding and curriculum plan across Nevada’s four reservation-based schools. They would hope to have it done before the next legislative session in 2025.
“These schools have been neglected for decades,” Melendez said. “But it’s not just the facilities. We need solutions regarding the teacher shortage, the teacher housing issue, culturally insensitive and inaccurate curriculum. There’s a host of Indian education issues that we need to tackle.”
Package of transgender health bills bucks GOP trend
Lombardo's passage of two transgender rights bills bucked trends from other Republican governors across the country who have pushed anti-transgender policies, even as the governor vetoed another measure.
Lombardo's signing of a bill Monday requiring health insurance companies including Medicaid cover all gender-affirming surgeries was the third major bill related to transgender health and rights to reach his desk.
Another bill he signed earlier this month requires the state's Department of Corrections to adopt mental and medical health standards for transgender and gender-nonconforming people inside the state’s prisons, including cultural competency training for guards.
A half dozen Democratic-controlled Legislatures like Nevada's have moved bills protecting transgender health care, civil rights and legal protections. But Lombardo’s signature comes as Republican governors elsewhere have gone in the opposite direction, signing legislation curtailing the rights of transgender people.
“Nevada has for a very long time been a live-and-let-live type of state,” said transgender rights advocate Brooke Maylath, who worked on all three bills. “And I’m glad to see that this governor has not been hijacked by the divisiveness that we’ve seen in other states.”
Still, Maylath criticized Lombardo for vetoing a bill earlier this month that would have protected providers of gender-affirming services from losing their medical license and prohibited the executive branch from assisting in out-of-state prosecution. She said that the absence of those protections would exacerbate Nevada’s already-existing provider shortage.
In his veto message, Lombardo said the bill would hinder his office’s ability to “be certain that all gender-affirming care related to minors comports with State law,” and to ensure public health and safety standards.
Lombardo’s latest signature for the bill requiring health insurance companies to cover all gender-affirming surgeries comes after Oregon’s Democratic governor signed a nearly-identical law in May.
Signing that bill has led to internal party criticism for Lombardo, the former sheriff of Clark County who was the only Republican to unseat a Democratic incumbent governor in the 2022 midterms.
Nevada’s Republican National Committeewoman Sigal Chattah called Lombardo a “laughingstock across the nation” in a tweet.
“I implore people to read the bill in its entirety,” Lombardo told reporter Tuesday, adding that it mainly shores up already-existing procedures. “And you will see it’s not as draconian or detrimental or immoral as people are portraying it to be.”
One of the sponsor's of the bill signed Monday, Democratic Senator Melanie Scheible, had framed the legislation as a way to save the state money due to potential losses in lawsuits against state Medicaid. She cited a 2015 declaration from the state’s division of insurance that prohibits the denial of medically necessary care on the basis of gender identity.
“The idea is to clear up any ambiguity and to put the answer in the statute, instead of waiting for an answer from a court,” Scheible said in an interview earlier in the session.
Many credit the declaration as to why more major gender-affirming surgeries are increasingly deemed “medically necessary” rather than “cosmetic” in Nevada by insurance companies, thus making more gender-affirming surgeries covered.
Still, many procedures — hair transplants, facial feminization surgery and voice modification among them — are often still classified as “cosmetic” despite their role in treating gender dysphoria, regarded as a medical condition that results in severe distress because of a mismatch between gender identity and gender assigned at birth.
The bill passed along party lines in the state Senate and Assembly, with Republicans opposed.
Lombardo also bucked party trends earlier this month when he signed another bill into law that further codified existing protections that ensure commissions that oversee medical licenses do not discipline or disqualify doctors who provide abortions.