LATEST NEWS

Nevada’s frequently bleak educational outcomes are often compounded when a student comes from an at-risk population. These populations can include students with disabilities, students from low-income families, students in the foster care system, and students who do not perform at grade level.Recognizing this problem, the Nevada Legislature has crafted a series of bills aimed at providing increased supports and services to children in the state’s most vulnerable subgroups. This post highlights the bills that seek to improve outcomes for at-risk youth in our state and discusses our research on why these bills are a good idea or contain good ideas for improving educational quality in Nevada.

As the end of the 79th Session of the Nevada Legislature draws near, legislators from both sides of the aisle and in both houses continue work on passing several pieces of legislation that aim to help increase student achievement in Nevada.

The federal government is planning to look into state laws that allow for marijuana use for non-medial purposes, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said in a press conference last week. Meanwhile, Nevada is moving ahead with its rollout of its legalized marijuana program, with sales set to begin on July 1, 2017.Marijuana was legalized in Nevada in November 2016, following the passage of a ballot initiative. More than 54 percent of the State’s 1.1 million voters voted in favor of the measure, nearly ten percent higher, or roughly 100,000 votes more than the number opposed to it. (See the Guinn Center Fact Sheet on this ballot initiative that examined the initiative to tax and regulate marijuana in the Silver State).

Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) Chancellor John V. White recently presented a report to the Board of Regents and the public on the state of higher education in Nevada. The report, which compared Nevada to states with similar population sizes (i.e., Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, and Utah), highlighted the struggles NSHE schools have faced in recent years—both in funding and in student achievement. In this comparison, Nevada often came up last—or nearly last in a variety of categories.

Recent reporting by the Guinn Center has highlighted studies on the effects of the criminal justice system on families and women in Nevada. This blog explores a new report from the Juvenile Law Center, “Debtor’s Prison for Kids? The High Cost of Fines and Fees in the Juvenile Justice System,” an analysis of the juvenile justice system in the U.S., which has one million new youth entrants every year.

As the wildfires that engulfed thousands of acres across the Southwest this summer are dying down, a different type of fire is consuming the members of Legislative Commission’s Subcommittee to Study Water and the Nevada State Engineer for the Division of Water Resources, Jason King. On August 26, hundreds of Nye County residents gathered at the committee’s meeting in Carson City to protest proposed changes to the laws governing well water usage in Pahrump Valley and across the state.

The number of women behind bars in the United States has grown to nearly 110,000—fourteen times the size of the population of women in jails and prisons forty years ago, says a new study from the Vera Institute of Justice, an organization that examines the country’s criminal justice system. The growth rate for women behind bars also outpaces the overall prison population growth, which is five times larger than it was in 1970.

Between now and November 2016, a statewide initiative petition to amend an existing Nevada statute is being circulated among Nevada voters to change the identification requirements for voters at the polls. The petition, known as The Initiative to Require Voter ID, or the Voter ID Act, seeks to amend Nevada Revised Statute (NRS) 293.277. It would require a registered voter who wishes to vote in person to present photographic proof of identity to the applicable election board officer.

More than 99 percent of the 11.6 million jobs created during the recovery following the Great Recession were filled by workers with at least some college education, according a new report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Workers holding only a high school diploma or less added only 80,000 jobs since 2007, but 5.6 million of the 7.2 million jobs lost during the recession were for workers in this category, amounting to a recovery rate of only one percent.

In late June, the Guinn Center hosted a workshop, “Building Advocacy Capacity among Nevada’s Nonprofits,” which was cosponsored by the College of Southern Nevada. Approximately 70 participants from almost 50 nonprofits around the state attended the event.As part of the workshop, the Guinn Center administered an informal survey asking attendees about the extent to which their organizations collaborated with each other, applied for grants, communicated with their legislators, and used data effectively to advocate and raise awareness about the needs they are addressing.

In 2015, Governor Sandoval and the Nevada Legislature invested roughly $400 million in education each year over the 2015-2017 biennium. Unfortunately, the growing number of children living in poverty in Nevada could undermine the Silver State’s historic investments in education.According to newly released data by the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT Data Book, the United States has made some strides for families and children’s overall well-being. Nevada’s overall rank, however, was unchanged, as the Silver State ranked 47th overall for children in the U.S. for a second year in a row.

In approximately 406 days, on August 1, 2017, the Clark County School District is expected to look dramatically different than it does today. At that time, the recommendations of longtime educator and consultant Michael Strembitsky, could go into effect, creating “a radically different management structure and culture for the Clark County School District (CCSD) than what exists today.” This is if CCSD were to follow Strembitsky’s preliminary plan, which he presented to the Advisory Committee to Develop a Plan to Reorganize the Clark County School District on Thursday, June 16, 2016.

Last week, Nevada State Treasurer Dan Schwartz hosted a Payday Loan Summit, which brought together stakeholders around the Silver State to discuss the long term impacts of payday loan debt on consumers in Nevada.The state summit parallels similar conversations and related efforts nation-wide to address the impact of payday loan debt and explore greater protections for consumers. Earlier this year, Google, the popular web-browsing tech company, announced that the company will be removing all payday loan ads from its search engine effective this summer. While browsers can still “Google” payday loans, the ads themselves will no longer be visible under its ads section when a browser is searching through Google.

“Encouraging” was the word Nevada’s Chief Economist Bill Anderson used yesterday to describe the most recent labor market data for the Silver State. Anderson was speaking on behalf of the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) at the Economic Forum, the purpose of which is to provide “forecasts of the state’s General Fund revenues for each biennium budget.”

A report from the Pew Charitable Trusts ranks Nevada last among all 50 states in personal income growth since the Great Recession. While the report, which analyzed data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, finds that personal income in all states is now above pre-recession levels, Nevada’s growth was just 0.1 percent for over the period 2007-2015, lower than the national average growth rate of 1.6 percent and lower than other states in the Intermountain West.

This weekend, commencement exercises will take place at both of Nevada’s largest universities, University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) and University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). Nevada State College held its graduation last Saturday. Yet, these events in Nevada are cause for celebration for fewer students than elsewhere in the U.S. The number of students earning their bachelors degrees from these institutions remains far below the national average and also lower than many of the public colleges and universities in the Intermountain West.

Thirty-eight schools across Nevada celebrated National Charter School Week this week, and among them were the four new charter schools that have opened since 2014. More and more charter schools are expected to open across the state in coming years, thanks to a push from Governor Brian Sandoval to make the 2015 78th Legislative session “the education session.” However, a potential problem with funding could prevent charter schools from reaching the students in Nevada who need them most.

An estimated 55,000 children in Nevada—and more than five million children nationwide—are suffering from the instability and trauma caused by having an incarcerated parent, according to a new study from The Annie F. Casey Foundation. The report, “A Shared Sentence: The Devastating Toll of Incarceration on Kids, Families and Communities,” says that having a parent behind bars is “a stressful, traumatic experience of the same magnitude as abuse, domestic violence and divorce, with a potentially lasting negative impact on a child’s well-being.”

While news about national politics and the 2016 election has focused on the increasing polarization within and between the Democratic and Republican parties, another electoral force has been steadily but quietly growing: nonpartisan or independent voters.Nationally, independents have been on the rise fairly steadily since the early 1960s. Since 2008, more voters have identified as independent than as Democrat or Republican, and the gap has been growing according to this graph from the Pew Research Center:

While substantial progress has occurred in the U.S. on women’s issues in recent years, some states are doing better than others – and according to one new study, Nevada is doing worst of all in a number of areas. WalletHub recently compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 15 key metrics related to the socio-economic well-being of women, as well as their health care and safety.

As the AB 394 Legislative and Technical Advisory Committees continue their charge to determine the ideal structure for the Clark County School District, it is valuable to study other similar regions around the country to see how they have proceeded in establishing their school districts. Having moved to San Antonio in the past few months (where full disclosure I am employed by the San Antonio Independent School District), I believe there are important and useful comparisons between Clark and Bexar counties, which are similar in size and demographic diversity. The county comparison works well as both the Vegas and San Antonio metropolitan areas are contained largely in one county (San Antonio’s metropolitan area extends beyond Bexar County but the vast majority of the population is in Bexar County).