Group says funding for education still tricky
TRYING to follow education funding in the Silver State can leave you cross-eyed, but look hard enough and you’ll see that money sold as a win for education isn’t always that.
That’s what the Fund Our Future Nevada coalition says needs to change.
A key part of the group’s argument: revenues from two sources promoted as boosting education funding — the 2009 Initiative Petition 1 room tax and marijuana taxes — aren’t increasing the overall pot of money going to schools.
Instead, they are supplanting
— not supplementing — existing money in a “zero-sum” game, the campaign argues.
How could that be? Here’s a crash course.
Initiative Petition 1, approved by Nevada voters in 2009, created an additional 3 percent room tax for Clark and Washoe counties. That extra money was to go into what is known as the State Supplemental School Support Fund starting in July 2011.
From the text: “The money so appropriated is intended to supplement and not replace any other money appropriated, approved or authorized for expenditure to fund the operation of the public schools.”
But since 2011 the Legislature has instead been funneling it into the primary education funding account for the schools, known as the Distributive School Account, or DSA.
That means that supplemental account has lost out on $893.7 million from fiscal years 2012 to 2017, and that money was instead used to replace existing funding for education.
The governor’s finance office, however, has argued that using that money in the school account has freed general funds to allow for the creation of other education programs that resulted in millions of dollars in extra support for the state’s schools.
Marijuana revenues are even trickier to follow.
Though the retail tax for recreational weed doesn’t go to education, the 15 percent wholesale tax does help fund the DSA.
But that opens another can of worms. The Clark County School District takes issue with how marijuana revenue is distributed through the complicated Nevada Plan — the state’s education funding system that dates back to 1967.
And even though it goes to the school account, the Fund Our Future Nevada doesn’t want that money to simply supplant existing funds.
“People who don’t understand the Nevada Plan assume, ‘Oh, it’s going to schools,’ not realizing that actually the DSA is just reducing the state obligation,” said Anna Slighting, a member of the Hope for Nevada group that’s part of the coalition.
PAK-HARVEY
without incident Thursday at 3927 Chasing Heart Way, near Las Vegas Boulevard North and Lamb Boulevard, according to Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Jay Rivera. Further details were not available Friday, as his probable cause arrest report had not been released.
The toddler was shot just after 11:50 a.m. Wednesday in an apartment complex on the 3900 block of North Nellis Boulevard. First responders
pronounced the boy dead at the scene, police said.
The shooting occurred when five boys under age 12, including the victim, were playing inside an apartment. At the time, Las Vegas homicide Lt. Ray Spencer said that the shooting appeared to be accidental but that police were still reviewing evidence.
Police said a boy, about 10 years old, fired the shot. Investigators on Wednesday were working to determine how the child got the gun but said that one boy who lived in another apartment might have brought the handgun to the residence.
But Slack and her family deny the police account of the shooting, rebuting Metro’s suspicion that another child shot Messiah. Slack, speaking outside the Chasing Heart Way home Friday afternoon, said another son of hers, 5, watched Messiah accidentally shoot himself.
Contact Rio Lacanlale at rlacanlale@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Follow @riolacanlale on Twitter. Contact Mike Shoro at mshoro@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5290. Follow @mike_shoro ontwitter.