Counselors make their case

The Assembly Education Committee embarked on its work for the session with a presentation from groups representing school guidance counselors.

Keeli Killian, president-elect of the Nevada Counselors Association, told the panel that Nevada ranks 39th in the nation in the counselor-to-student ratio and is nearly double the 250-to-1 rate the American School Counselor Association defines as optimal. Nevada’s rate as of the 2015-16 school year was 485-to-1.

The rate varies among counties, districts and schools across the state, with at least one elementary school effectively having one counselor for all 1,400 students, with 11 elementary schools having none at all, the committee was told.

Killian said counselors in some districts are assigned to other duties, becoming highly paid lunch workers in some cases. The group wants mandated counselors in every school, lower counselor-to-student ratios, and a minimum 80 percent of their time spent on helping students.

“It’s slightly impossible to have a school counselor program that serves all students when we don’t get our ratios down,” she told the committee.

Other counselors, one reduced to tears, told the panel of excessive high caseloads and burnout they have experienced. and his wife Alexis Hansen’s election to the Nevada Assembly in November, the husband and wife of 38 years became the first married couple in Nevada’s 154-year history to be elected to the state Legislature in the same session.

And not since Lincoln County Assemblyman Willard W. Smith and

Nye County Assemblywoman Florence B. Swasey were married at the end of the 1925 session has a married couple served in Legislature together, according to a declaration read into the record on the Assembly floor to recognize and celebrate the occasion. It considers a defendant’s criminal history and other factors that are designed to determine whether or not a defendant can be considered a flight risk and should therefore be jailed ahead of trial.

A pilot program that used the proposed “risk-assessment tool” was implemented in a handful of courts across the state in September 2016, including Washoe County District Court, Washoe County Justice Court and Las Vegas Justice Court, among others.

Proponents of the tool argued that the “scoring items” it uses to determine whether or not a defendant is a flight risk are based on science and that an overhaul of Nevada’s current system was long overdue.

But opponents argued that some of the scoring items stood to disproportionately affect people of color and the poor.