Youth Legislature drops age measure, adopts lottery plan

An avalanche of negative testimony Thursday helped bury a proposal by the Nevada Youth Legislature to lower the compulsory age for school attendance from 18 to 16.

Employers said they were not interested in hiring high school dropouts. And alternative education would be limited because many apprenticeships and adult education programs require participants to be at least 18, educators said.

One 13-year-old girl, Sophie, urged the Youth Legislators to pick up another cause, the trafficking of child sex slaves. But the Youth Legislature voted 13-3 to pick another bill, a proposal by Daniel Waqar, 15, a sophomore at the Advanced Technologies Academy in Las Vegas, to start a state lottery. The proceeds would go toward education.

The Youth Legislators, who are appointed by their state senators, can submit one bill to the Legislature for possible enactment into law. Their goal is prepare one bill in time for the 2011 session.

Lotteries have been a tough sell in the past. Several attempts to enact them have failed in previous legislative sessions.

Dominic Mariani, a 17-year-old Carson City High School student, originally proposed lowering the school age because he does not believe in keeping kids in school if they do not want to learn.

He accused the southern Youth Legislators of stacking the testimony against him, but Zhan Okuda-Lim, a 16-year-old student at Valley High School, said Mariani could have invited advocates to speak for his bill.

Thursday's meeting was video-conferenced between three locations. The southern Youth Legislators met at the Sawyer Building, the northern Youth Legislators were at the state Capitol and 18-year-old Ashley Manes, the Youth Legislator for rural Nevada, followed the discussion from a training room at a hospital in Ely.

The meeting started 90 minutes late because another meeting by the state's Interim Finance Committee ran long. Youth Legislators were scheduled to use the same room at the Sawyer Building.

Lawyers for the Legislature did not think the Youth Legislators could use another conference room because their meeting space had been advertised. They later consented to letting the Youth Legislators use another room, where the public was redirected.

State Sen. Valerie Wiener, D-Las Vegas, said students were learning things "we could have never scripted."

Contact reporter James Haug at jhaug@reviewjournal.com or 702-374-7917.