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Success in Education
June
1, 2007
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(word)
This past week brought a great victory to the
students of Nevada. The compromise we reached for education funding
gives me great hope for a brighter future for Nevada’s children.
My budget contained record increases for
education--18 percent for kindergarten through 12th grade and 16 percent
for higher education. It also contained the concept of Empowerment
schools. When it came to compromise, the legislative leadership of both
parties and I all yielded a little and by doing so our children gained a
lot.
Empowerment is my proposal to give individual
principals and their schools the power to manage their own budgets,
curricula and schedules to best serve their unique student
populations. This compromise ensures that empowerment receives the
meaningful pilot program it deserves in Nevada. A total of 29
schools will be empowered in ten Nevada counties. In addition, teachers
will get a six-percent pay increase over the next two years. Career and
technical education programs will get an additional $7 million over the
biennium. Further, the Innovative Education Fund, which has been
working wonders in school districts like White Pine County, where
student achievement has increased dramatically, gets roughly a $17
million infusion.
Higher education also kept the increased per-student
funding which I proposed and even managed to achieve more than $50
million in "hold harmless" funding, which protects college and
university budgets even when enrollment falls below projections.
I cannot take credit for supporting every
successful education program. Nor can I say I won all that I wanted to
achieve for our schools. However, I believe all of us involved in the
process, especially Senate Majority Leader Raggio, Speaker Buckley and
I, acted in what we believed was the best interest of Nevada’s students.
In the end, Nevada’s students won.
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