Students Thrive With Opportunity (Opinion)

Americans love choice. We love the freedom to choose what we want and when we want it. Ford or Chevy, Coke or Pepsi, Apple or Samsung, we thrive on the multitude of options at our fingertips that we feel best meets our needs. The essence of it all is the opportunity we have to choose the type of life we want and how we get there. This is, of course, unless you’re talking about education in the State of Nevada.

Hanging in the balance right now as the 80th Legislative Session continues is the future of the Nevada Opportunity Scholarship Program adopted by the legislature in 2015. This popular program was approved by the legislature to provide families who live within 300 percent of the poverty line an opportunity to change the trajectory of their children’s lives by applying for third-party grants funded by state businesses to be available for private school tuition.

Since the legislation was approved, applications have doubled every year to now over 2,300 students who are receiving funding. Moreover, the students in program are excelling. Earlier this month, the Nevada Department of Education, www.doe.nv.gov, released a report that showed 68 percent of students in the program demonstrated a positive score change on the various measurements used. This is juxtaposed to the state’s profile on the Nation’s Report Card, nationsreportcard.gov, that reveals fourth and eighth graders studied are “significantly lower than the national average.”

Moreover, according to Education Week’s annual survey last year, the State of Nevada’s public education system ranked last out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Earning a grade of “D” for the second straight year, Nevada owns one of the most dubious and troubling statistics in the country. And now, inexplicably, the legislature is attempting to double down on this by trading educational futures during the current legislative session by denying educational opportunity to some of the state’s highest performing students.

Despite the freedom we have in virtually every other aspect of life, our single payer education system mandates the use of our tax dollars for one educational option and, in Nevada’s case, a substandard one. This is contrary to choice and expectations we have in virtually every other arena, including our choice in political representation, which we can exercise to affect other tax consequences.

The expectation Americans have in receiving value for every other consumer choice is likely why America now sees 32 states offering educational choices. Data and links available at EdChoice.org show available educational opportunity in each of these states, which in several cases offers several options. This is also because one-size does not fit all, something our family knows all too well.

Our children are intelligent, funny and will have much to offer our community and world, despite the challenges they been forced to overcome. Both adopted, our daughter came to us with ADHD and ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder), and her biological brother with ADHD and PTSD after being abandoned by his drug addicted mother.

We have been the gambit with education; from public school to homeschool and back to public school and it has been a challenge. Despite my many meetings and follow up with counselors, teachers, etc. my daughter was failing academically, yet teachers continued to comment on how intelligent she was. The class sizes were too big, the distractions were too tempting, and the teachers were too overloaded to deal with our daughter’s needs. Our daughter also felt she was always being punished because her grades made it so she could not participate in sports or other activities, yet with her disabilities that would actually have helped her.

Our son has a similar story. The school system passed him grade after grade, but by the end of fifth grade, he was at a second grade reading and writing level. We fought hard for an IEP through many meetings with counselors and teachers, and he was able to catch up. However, by the third year he had progressed just enough that he no longer qualified for an IEP. His grades failed, and he was not allowed to participate in sports. Despite constant teacher contact and promises of follow up, the teachers basically said they were doing all they could based on the large class sizes they had. They can only, "Teach to the Middle" is the way it was phrased by one teacher.

I was educated through public schools and went on to graduate college, but there are enough children for whom public school is not a fit, and hundreds of these types of students up and down the state are thriving, in large measure because of the opportunity the Nevada Opportunity scholarship provides.

Students qualifying for the Opportunity Scholarship should not be forced to endure a subpar public educational system when it has been demonstrated that they are thriving in other educational settings. Thirty-two other states have come to this realization and now also provide alternate educational opportunities. Incidentally, all 32 states rank ahead of Nevada in public education.

Families of the Battle Born State should not be denied the opportunity to apply for a legislatively-approved program in the oft chance Nevada schools might turn around. To deny another generation of Nevada’s young people access to the best education the state has to offer is not only unconscionable for the students it affects, but also for the deleterious effect it will have on Nevada’s future workforce. They are our future, is there really any question what should be done?