After another legislative session with limited progress on expanding school choice in Nevada, advocates are now placing their hopes on a new federal program that they say can supplement an Opportunity Scholarship program that has repeatedly been starved by Democrats. 

President Donald Trump’s major spending bill, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” included a provision that creates a federal tax credit to support scholarships for K-12 students to cover educational expenses such as private school tuition. 

The funding mechanism set up in the bill is similar to the state’s own Nevada Educational Choice Scholarship Program, better known as the Opportunity Scholarship program. But the Nevada program is targeted at lower-income families seeking private school education and constrained by a maximum amount of donations set by state statute, $6.65 million, that has kept enrollment under 2,000.  

The new federal program, which will go into effect in 2027, doesn’t have a cap. It will also allow higher-income families to take part. States will need to opt in to participate and select scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) that will gather the donations and administer the scholarships. 

But other details, such as how much each student who signs up for a scholarship can expect to receive, are still undefined. The bill directs the Treasury to create rules on how the program will work. 

The decision to opt in belongs to the governor or another agency or official who “is designated under state law to make such elections on behalf of the state with respect to federal tax benefits.” States must submit a list of the organizations that will manage the scholarships no later than Jan. 1 each year of the program. It’s expected that red states will generally be supportive of the new school choice opportunity, while Democratic governors will face pressure to participate. 

A spokeswoman for Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, a strong school choice advocate, said in a statement that Lombardo’s office and the Nevada Department of Education (NDE) are evaluating the bill and Lombardo continues looking for ways to “enhance choice options for Nevada students and parents.”

Representatives for Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas) and Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas) did not respond to a request for comment on the program or whether they are trying to influence the decision on whether Nevada should opt in. 

Supporters who want the state to opt in say the new program is critical in Nevada, where proposed expansions of the Opportunity Scholarship program have been a nonstarter for Democrats who have controlled both legislative chambers since 2016. Public school advocates effectively killed the Education Savings Account program that would have allowed state funds to be used for private school tuition and other educational expenses. 

“It’s historic for us in states like Nevada where we have been fighting for a very long time, unable to get more opportunities for our families,” said Valeria Gurr, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. “This is going to be life-changing, in my opinion.” 

But opponents including Educate Nevada Now, a group whose goals include dramatically increasing funding to public schools, say the tax credit “is about privatizing education and starving public education of resources,” rather than improving education. 

Creating school choice opportunities

There are 22 state-level tax credit programs in 18 states, including Nevada’s Opportunity Scholarship program, which was created by the Legislature in 2015 when Republicans had a rare trifecta of power. 

The state program is funded by donations from corporations to SGOs. The corporations, in exchange, receive a modified business tax credit. It’s geared to students whose family has a household income not more than 300 percent of the federal poverty level. In 2025, that would be $96,450 for a family of four. 

About 1,800 students received a scholarship in 2023, according to an NDE report. The average household income of recipients varied by SGO, and ranged from $55,000 to under $59,000. 

Catherine Thompson, superintendent of Catholic schools within the Archdiocese of Las Vegas, said after the Opportunity Scholarship program’s inception, she saw a boom in parents interested in sending their children to Catholic schools. She estimates that today, 15 percent of the 3,700 students attending the archdiocese’s schools receive an Opportunity Scholarship. 

“We really were amazed,” Thompson said. "That was a game changer for a number of our families who felt that prior to that, they couldn't consider a Catholic school tuition on top of all the other obligations that their families have.” 

As written, the 2015 bill (AB165) provided $5 million for such scholarships in the first fiscal year and $5.5 million in the next, with a built-in “escalator” that would slowly ramp up the cap on available tax credits by 10 percent every year.

At its height during the 2017-2018 school year, the program’s cap reached $26 million thanks to a one-time injection. 

But the program has since been limited over the years as Democrats removed the program’s funding ramp and have blocked attempts to increase the maximum amount of business tax credits allotted for the program, although even Democrats have been loath to end the program entirely for students still on scholarships.

The program also suffered a blow in 2023 after a separate round of one-time funding approved in 2021 came to end, bringing the program’s cap from $11.4 to its current cap of about $6.65 million. 

The instability of the program has been felt at Las Vegas-area Catholic schools. Thompson said enrollment declines driven in part by students who lost scholarship funds were a significant reason for the closures of two of the archdiocese’s schools, St. Christopher in 2022 and St. Anne last year. 

“So the implications were quite serious with students losing their scholarships,” Thompson said. 

Thompson said she is anxious to see if the new federal tax credit will be able to help more Nevada students than the existing state program is able to in its current form. 

How the federal program works

Like the state’s current program, the new federal program relies on donations to fund the scholarships. 

Under Trump’s major bill, individuals can receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donations of up to $1,700 to state-approved scholarship granting organizations in participating states. Businesses would not be able to donate. The bill has no cap on the total amount of donations or end date. 

Though the scholarships aren’t directly funded through public money, according to Congress' nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, the new tax break is estimated to cost the federal government $3 billion to $4 billion per year. 

The scholarships will be open to students from households earning no more than 300 percent of their area’s median gross income who are eligible to attend a public elementary or secondary school. 

In Clark County, that would equal to no more than $284,700, but no more than $192,300 in Mineral County, the county with the lowest median income in the state, according to 2025 data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

“The goal here is to get everyone to have eligibility, regardless of their wealth,” said Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, a national school choice advocacy organization. 

Although the full details of how this program will work are not yet finalized, advocates expect that new scholarships can be stacked on top of the existing state school choice programs. 

Gurr said that’s particularly beneficial in Nevada because there’s a ceiling on the maximum total scholarship amount a student can receive even if they apply to multiple SGOs. In 2025, that amount was about $10,000. The average private school tuition in Nevada is about $12,000 per year, according to Private School Review. 

In 2023, the average scholarship amount among the three largest SGOs ranged from about $4,000 to a little more than $6,000, according to the latest program report. 

And unlike the Opportunity Scholarship, the scholarships raised with the federal tax credit won’t be limited to current and aspiring private school students. The scholarships will also be open for students at traditional public and charter schools and can be used for educational expenses such as tuition and fees, curriculum materials, tutoring, services for students with special needs, books, supplies, computers and transportation. 

Educate Nevada Now has opposed school voucher programs and criticized the Trump administration for approving the tax credit program while freezing billions of dollars in grant funding for K-12 school meant for English language learner services, adult literacy, teacher professional development and more (the funding was later reinstated). 

“State voucher programs have resulted in rampant fraud and abuse, poor academic outcomes for students, and chronically strained state budgets,” said Educate Nevada Now Executive Director Amanda Morgan in a July 21 statement. “These issues will only be heightened given the extreme lack of oversight and limits within the federal program.”

For Gurr, the federal tax credit can’t come soon enough. 

“Families only have one chance at a quality education, so a lot of families are very desperate for this to start,” she said.