LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Amid the sounds of the Sunridge Mountain High School mariachi band and the shouts of the Mountain Valley Elementary School's spiritline, top state officials gathered in east Las Vegas Monday to celebrate a bipartisan win.
Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, and state Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro, a Democrat, lauded the passage of Senate Bill 460, a massive, 200-page education reform bill.
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The bill was the result of a merger of legislation sought by Cannizzaro and a reform bill brought by Lombardo, aimed at boosting student achievement, getting and keeping good teachers and bringing more accountability to Nevada schools.
Cannizzaro said the bill was possible because she and the governor left their party affiliation at the door.
"Those sort of labels shouldn't be what is dictating our policy," Cannizzaro said. "And I think no matter what the issue is, if you can find some common goals and think about how this is impacting Nevadans, we can always move from a place on that and find that compromise that allows us to do good things and to move policy forward."
Lombardo noted that it was not his first collaboration with Cannizzaro; they both worked on education legislation in the 2023 session as well, although he said change and progress is sometimes slow.
"It takes a long time to turn a battleship," he said. "And education is a battleship."
Lombardo, in his remarks in the Mountain View auditorium before signing a stack of ceremonial copies of SB 460, agreed with Cannizzaro that working across party lines is key.
"It was a bipartisan effort," he said. "And as you can imagine, education is a bipartisan effort, right? It involves kids and their future, and without a bipartisan [effort] you're myopic, you make decisions in a tunnel and you make decisions based on partisanship. And that's not a good recipe for success as it pertains to education."
New Clark County School District Superintendent Jhone Ebert said she welcomed the passage of the bill. "We're happy to be held accountable," she said.
And Marie Neisess, president of the Clark County Education Association, lauded the bill's provisions aimed at helping teachers, including a pipeline to educate today's students who will become the next generation of teachers.
The bill also contains money to recruit and retain teachers, and a pay differential for teachers who volunteer to work in schools with hard-to-fill vacancies.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Steve Canavero said the bill expands choice, by extending open enrollment across all schools statewide, and by establishing a $7 million account for transportation for students to attend a school outside their current attendance zone.
There's also money for early literacy programs, to help students meet the state's Read By Grade 3 requirement, as well as provisions to keep track of performance and to require under-performing schools to submit written plans to improve.
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