By Tara Bevington, Rabbi Mendel Levine and Don Soifer

In the coming days, Gov. Steve Sisolak will decide how he will allocate Nevada’s share of the $3 billion federal Governors’ Emergency Education Relief Fund. The extent to which he includes our state’s private school students in his funding plan likely represents their best chance to survive economic conditions now and whenever schools are able to reopen.

The community of Nevada students who attend private elementary and secondary schools is relatively small. At five percent, it is about half of a national average which has barely changed over the past twenty years.

Ours is a sector of private schools rich in diversity. We have schools offering unique expertise serving children with special needs, as well as gifted and talented learners. Our faith-based schools represent 10 different denominations. Other Nevada private schools are dedicated to providing specialized schooling approaches rarely available from public schools, such as Montessori and Waldorf education.

Most of Nevada’s 20,000 private school students belong to working households where parents make regular sacrifices so that their kids can receive different educational experiences than they would in public schools. Thousands of Nevada’s private school students have household income eligibility for free and reduced-price meals under the National School Lunch Program.

Gov. Sisolak’s leadership and consistently forthcoming information flow through the present point in this crisis has been invaluable from the perspective of school leaders. When Sisolak prudently ordered all Nevada schools closed on March 15, many private schools had already made this same decision. Our private school educators and families have wrestled with the same challenges (driven by a sudden shift to distance learning) as all other schools have, including questions of how children from lower-income households without technology or reliable broadband internet access can continue learning equitably alongside their classmates, and questions about how children facing food insecurity can receive regular meals.

Recent regulatory flexibilities and measures taken by the governor and the Nevada Department of Education in response to the COVID-19 public health emergency have all been sensible.

Even though Nevada’s private schools community is a small one, relatively speaking, our alumni, nonetheless, rank among the productive and distinguished leaders across nearly every sector of our state’s civic and business life.

It is our great hope that this COVID-19 emergency passes swiftly and with the very minimum of human cost beyond what our state has already endured. Likewise, we hope the harms from income insecurity within our communities may also be limited in every way possible.

Extending financial relief to our private schools sector is not a question of support for school choice. It is about helping working families make ends meet and avoiding huge life and financial disruptions. Private school tuition payments are already failing to arrive — the critical operating revenue our schools rely on to run payroll for more than 1,600 teachers, along with administrators, support personnel, and other staff.

It is our hope that when we move beyond this present crisis, all of Nevada’s schools, public and private, will survive to meet the educational needs of our children and families. The best way we can ensure this future is for Gov. Sisolak to use his broad discretion to extend needed relief to all Nevada schools.

Tara Bevington, Rabbi Mendel Levine and Don Soifer are the officers of the Nevada Council for American Private Education (NV-CAPE), Nevada’s private schools association.