What did state lawmakers do for local schools in the 2025 legislative session?

Education was a focal point of Nevada’s 83rd legislative session, and the Clark County School District — which educates 65 percent of the state’s students — will soon begin to feel the effects of a sweeping, bipartisan education bill.

Following last session’s historic education funding, this year’s education budget saw more modest gains in per pupil funding. Senate Bill 500 provides an average of $13,889 per pupil in 2026 and $13,963 per pupil in 2027, nearly $600 more than in 2025 and $1,000 more than in 2024. The education fund comes from the state’s general fund. In May, legislators discovered Nevada was facing $191 million less general fund revenue than it had during 2026-27 than previously predicted.

“Given the revenue that they were dealing with, I think the legislators and the governor did a good job, and the best job they could do, without having any real severe cuts to education, and so we view that as positive,” Clark County Education Association Executive Director John Vellardita, who played a significant role in shaping the education policy ultimately passed.

The session closed with Senate Bill 460, which merged Gov. Joe Lombardo’s and Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro’s education bills into one, being passed by both houses.

Among its hundreds of pages, the bipartisan bill peels back the controversial 2017 reorganization law, grants appointed trustees on the School Board voting rights, expands open enrollment and pre-K, establishes a differential pay scale for hard-to-fill positions, protects teachers from being sued for breaking up fights and increases accountability over the school district.

Lombardo also signed Assembly Bill 48, a CCSD-sponsored bill that allows school districts to move a perpetrator of bullying to another school. Prior to the bill, only the victim could move schools.

The school district did not respond to repeated requests for an interview with Superintendent Jhone Ebert or to requests for the school district to comment on any aspect of the legislative session.

Accountability, oversight is priority

Even before the session began, legislators on both sides of the aisle were calling for a higher level of scrutiny of the Clark County School District.

After receiving historic funding in the previous legislative session, the school district faced a budget crisis last fall, which led to schools cutting staff and programming. The governor assigned a compliance monitor to the school district, and Cannizzaro grilled school district officials in an Interim Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on Education Accountability in December.

Despite the differences in Lombardo and Cannizzaro’s originally separate bills, both emphasized accountability and oversight over schools and districts as a whole.

Changes to reorganization law

That emphasis on accountability, Vellardita said, was a key reason that CCEA changed positions on the reorganization law it originally pushed for in 2017.

Assembly Bill 469, passed in 2017, was designed to give schools more site-based control over their budgets. The law said that 85 percent of the school district’s money would go to individual schools. School-based organizational teams, or SOTs, led by principals and made up of parents and staff, made decisions on how to use that money.

SB460 rolls back the site-based decision making, though it keeps the teams in place.

The 2017 bill had several hindrances to its implementation. When it was first passed, the Clark County School Board was known for not liking it, and in 2022, Ebert (then superintendent of public instruction) sent a noncompliance notice to the School Board. COVID-19 also set back student outcomes.

Although CCEA acknowledged the hindrances, Vellardita said that eight years in, it was clear the reorganization was not accomplishing its goals. One of the main challenges of the law that CCEA did not anticipate, he said, was schools holding carryover dollars for years. That meant that some schools hoarded money for years, while others had none.

Vellardita said that with the lack of success as well as increased accountability measures in the education bill, site-based control no longer makes sense.

“You can’t pass a bill like 460 that now says trustees, a school district and a superintendent are accountable for the outcomes in a school, and if they’re not, they can be removed and have a firewall around that school, which doesn’t allow them to intervene or control the outcome, which is what the reorg has become,” Vellardita said.

Rebecca Dirks Garcia, the administrator of the CCSD Parents Facebook page, was on three school-based organizational teams and chaired two in the 2024-2025 school year. She said she was wary of this session’s change.

“They have never produced the results expected because they were never given the opportunity to do so,” Dirks Garcia said of SOTs. “But at the same time, now gutting the central intent of the reorg but leaving those committees in place feels even more like we’re going to have a dog and pony show.”

Vacancy pay, pre-K

SB460 also expands open enrollment. CCSD currently has a Change of School Assignment policy, but this bill allows funding for transportation to other schools, which can be a barrier for families unable to get their children to the desired school.

“I think there’s a lot of families that would choose another school if transportation was available,” Dirks Garcia said.

The bill is also coupled with Assembly Bill 398, which allocates money for high vacancy Title I (low income schools that receive federal funding) and special education positions. CCEA and the school district previously agreed to a stipend, but the money ran out before it reached a year.

SB460 also grants the four board members appointed by Clark County, Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Henderson voting rights on the Clark County School Board starting in 2027.

Ebert had repeatedly said that securing universal pre-K was a legislative priority for her. The final bill allotted money for some pre-K programs, but not enough to make it universal.

What didn’t happen?

Dirks Garcia said she felt that the modest changes were not enough and that Nevada needed a more long-term investment in education.

“I would love to see really sustained, thoughtful work that gets implemented,” Dirks Garcia said. “I think we’re so scared of saying the word tax, and we’re so scared of upsetting power balances that we don’t actually move the needle for kids, and that gets frustrating as a parent.”

Contact Katie Futterman at kfutterman@reviewjournal.com. Follow @ktfutts on X and @katiefutterman.bsky.social.