Nevada Medicaid approved a requirement that therapists receive prior approval before providing more than five therapy sessions to a patient at a meeting on Tuesday after nearly two hours of public comment from therapists, patients and mental health advocates expressing their concerns about the proposed change.

A national group that advocates for veterans who have served in wars since 9/11 is at the middle of a back and forth in Nevada’s U.S. Senate race over whether the group is truly nonpartisan after it gave U.S. Sen. Dean Heller a poor rating on a scorecard in 2010.

Gov. Brian Sandoval stopped by a Las Vegas high school Monday to see an award-winning robotics program. While there, he touched on a variety of education issues, including the need for a weighted funding formula.

Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer is one of the most prominent voices advocating for marijuana legalization in Congress, to the point that he became one of four founding members of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus. He took time last week to answer questions from The Nevada Independent about the outlook for marijuana legislation in Washington D.C. Here are some takeaways from the conversation.

During the last legislative session, the Nevada Department of Agriculture received a $500,000 appropriation to fund conservation projects for farmers and ranchers across the state. Under the appropriation, the Nevada Department of Agriculture has funded 11 conservation projects to decrease demands on streams, rivers and aquifers throughout the state.

The Nevada education community is on the hunt for a magical number. The mystery number — probably large and most likely unachievable all at once — is the dollar figure that could propel the state’s long-struggling K-12 system to higher ground through better class sizes, resources and programs.

Clearer answers on why there’s an uptick in the prison population could be on the way now that the state has partnered with the Crime and Justice Institute. The organization’s staff will be spending about a year making large-scale data requests from courts, prisons and other agencies, interviewing people who work in the criminal justice system and helping Nevada leaders develop policy recommendations that could become law through the 2019 legislative session.

Clark County School District officials said 530 classroom positions remained vacant at the beginning of August — up from 408 last year and 355 in 2016. Still, it’s far below the peak of 944 classroom vacancies at that same time in 2015.

Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto says she supports an eventual move to a “Medicare-for-All” universal health insurance program, but that moving to a federally run universal health insurance model wasn’t immediately plausible.