Sparks flew behind yellow, plastic barriers inside Debbie Smith Career and Technical Academy as students built parts for a NASA rover on an October afternoon. 

Welding and metalworks is one of the nine programs at the Reno high school, which opened this school year. The sprawling campus has large, open spaces for learning, a lab where nursing students complete with gurneys and dummies standing in for patients, and a kitchen and cafe to give culinary students hands-on experience. 

Student Anthony Arroyo Ramirez said his previous school in the district, the Academy of Arts, Careers and Technology, didn’t have its own shop, forcing students to use a community college campus to practice their welding skills. 

When the new school opened, the students helped set up the machines that they are now using in class. 

“It was nice because it’s a new skill that we learned,” said Arroyo Ramirez. 

Debbie Smith is the latest school the district has been able to build with the help of a Washoe County sales tax passed by voters in 2016 to address overcrowding and aging campuses. 

Nearly a decade later, those involved in the passage of WC-1 view the ballot measure as transformational — a huge feat that set the district apart from those in other counties that are struggling to build new schools or even maintain existing ones. 

WC-1 — spearheaded by parents, teachers and business leaders — came about as the district grew from about 62,000 students in 2012 to its peak of nearly 68,000 students during the 2019-20 school year. In 2016, 56 percent of Washoe County voters approved a 0.54 percent sales tax increase to support the district’s capital funding needs, which includes acquisition, construction, repair and renovation of school facilities. 

Arroyo Ramirez’s new school is named after the late Sen. Debbie Smith (D-Reno), whose 2015 bill (SB411) laid the groundwork for the eventual ballot question. 

The sales tax has unleashed a construction blitz. 

As of June, the sales tax allowed the district to invest $1 billion in capital projects such as eight new schools, expansion or upgrades for two existing schools and two school rebuilds. The majority of the spending, more than $700 million, came through bond financing and brought relief to schools that once relied on portable classrooms and alternative school calendars. 

“Some of those schools were in areas that didn’t have a school,” said Mark Mathers, the district’s chief financial officer. “So it addressed the needs that had built up over the prior 10 to 20 years with no funding available.”

The district of more than 100 schools has seven more projects in the works, slated to be completed in 2026 and 2027. 

Nine years after the passage of the sales tax, the school district’s enrollment is heading in the opposite direction. That means a reduction in per-pupil funding from the state, which is contributing to a projected budget deficit of $18 million for next school year. 

As the district prepares to shutter aging schools that are experiencing underenrollment, officials said the funds are still needed to make sure that the district can afford to upgrade its existing schools and maintain the new ones. 

“We’ve got 50-, 60-, 70-year-old schools that have outlived their life expectancy and need to be replaced or modernized in very significant ways,” said Adam Searcy, the district’s chief operating officer. “This to me is just the next chapter of the WC-1 story.” 

Getting support 

Before WC-1, the district primarily relied on the portion of the county’s property tax that’s earmarked for the district to fix up its school. But, according to Mathers, that revenue was not enough to build a new school. 

That contrasts with districts that could count on other sources to fund school construction, such as Clark County’s hotel tax and Carson City’s county infrastructure sales tax.

“So Washoe was kind of behind the curve in terms of that funding ability to address long-term, long-standing needs,” Mathers said. 

It’s a common story in Nevada, where school districts typically don’t receive financial support from the state to build or maintain facilities, leaving them dependent on local funding sources such as property tax, which are limited by tax breaks and the size of each county’s tax base.

During the 2015 legislation session, lawmakers passed a bill sponsored by Smith that opened the door for local committees to propose new taxes to fund school district capital projects.  

“This is long overdue,” Smith told lawmakers at a May 2015 legislative committee meeting. “I implore you to do something now. It is time to show some leadership and get this done.” 

Washoe’s Public School Overcrowding and Repair Needs Committee put forward a 2016 ballot initiative that raised the county’s sales tax from 7.725 percent to 8.265 percent, making it second behind Clark County’s rate of 8.375 as the highest in the state. 

But getting voters’ support for tax initiatives can be an uphill battle. 

Mike Kazmierski, the former president and CEO of the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada (EDAWN), was part of the committee. 

Kazmierski said that generally getting voters to support a sales tax, which is paid for by all consumers, including visitors, is an easier lift than getting them to support other types of increases such as property taxes, which could take a heavier hit on their pockets. 

That political reality holds even though sales tax hikes are criticized as regressive, meaning they eat up a larger percentage of money from lower-income households than higher-income ones.

“It doesn’t matter how much the amount is … when people talk about property tax, your likely voters automatically vote no,” he said. 

Kazmierski said they appealed to voters by emphasizing how much students stood gain if the tax was passed versus the tax’s projected cost at the time — less than $10 a month for a median income family of four. 

Since 2017, the sales tax, known as WC-1, has brought in nearly $500 million in new revenue for the school district, an average of about $50 million per year. This is in addition to other capital funding sources the district receives. The district’s budget for this school year includes almost $100 million from its portion of the county’s property tax. 

“I think, from a sizing standpoint, it worked out well so that it's not too little, it's not too much, it's kind of a Goldilocks number,” Mathers said.  

Jeff Church, a former Washoe County school board trustee, led the opposition against WC-1. One of Church’s primary concerns was the lack of a sunset on the tax. Church did not immediately respond to request for comment on whether he still opposes the tax. 

But Kazmierski explained that the lack of a sunset clause was essential.  

“Once you build it, you have to maintain it, and it gets much more expensive over time,” he said. 

Just last year, Washoe County voted against renewing a property tax that helped fund public libraries. 

In 2020, Elko County voters rejected renewing a tax mechanism that had brought in $250 million to their school district since its inception more than three decades ago. During a 2021 special election, voters turned down a proposal to allow the district to take out $150 million in general obligation bonds for funding capital projects, citing mistrust in the Elko County School District and opposition to high taxes. 

But Church said in a Friday statement he still believes that “any tax should have a sunset,” and points to all the schools the district has already built thanks to WC-1 as well as its decline in student enrollment as why it's no longer needed. 

“Bottomline is that opponent Jeff Church was right and we are now stuck with it possibly forever,” he said. 

To help build trust, the Washoe County School District created a dedicated oversight committee for the WC-1 funds. The Capital Funding Protection Committee is composed of Reno and Sparks city council members, county commissioners and experts in structural or civil engineering, construction of public works projects and gaming and one member of the general public. 

The committee ensures that the funds are being used properly, and gives proposed projects initial approval before forwarding them to the board of trustees for final approval. 

In 2020, an audit concluded that the district was using the WC-1 funds as intended. 

“In general, it's done a fantastic job of doing what the voters wanted it to do, and that was to make sure that our students have good, safe environments to be able to learn,” said Sparks City Councilman Paul Anderson, who serves as a chair of the committee. 

Even though the need for new schools has diminished, Anderson said there will always be a need to invest WC-1 funds in school maintenance.

“I would honestly say we're never going to have more money than we have need,” he said.

Entering a new era

After having confronted the overcrowding issue, the district is facing a new challenge: underenrollment. 

Lower birth rates, higher housing costs and the expansion of charter schools have contributed to a declining headcount for the district.

This shift in student enrollment forecast caused the district to pump the brakes on new school construction. This included plans for a second elementary school in Spanish Springs, a subdivision in Sparks experiencing high growth, where its elementary school, Bohach, was experiencing overcrowding just a few years after it opened in 2020. 

“We actually put that project on the shelf,” Searcy said, adding that the project was nearing the construction phase when the district decided to suspend it. 

The district’s 2023 Facilities Modernization Plan recommends following a “newer-fewer” operational model where outdated schools experiencing underenrollment are phased out, while the district focuses on upgrading or even rebuilding other campuses such as Vaughn Middle School and Echo Loder Elementary School in Reno. 

Both schools were built in the 1950s. Nearly all students at these schools are considered economically disadvantaged.   

On Tuesday, the district’s school board approved a plan to close and eventually repurpose four elementary schools — Roger Corbett, Veterans Memorial, Edwin S. Dodson and Smithridge — over the next two school years. 

“While change is hard, I’m really excited and also truly proud that our county is turning the WC-1 funds toward more established and often impoverished communities,” said Corbett Principal Joseph Pazar. 

Searcy said the WC-1 funds give the Washoe County School District an advantage over other school districts that have closed or are in the process of closing schools because of lower enrollment. 

“We’re aspiring to frame it as a trade up scenario,” Searcy said. “We’re going to close schools and rezone these students, but we’re also going to make major investments into the schools that they will be attending. That's the gift of WC-1 that allows us to do this, and do this the right way.”