The Legislature is done. The final bills were passed, and the budget approved. The politicians and the lobbyists can go home and take a breather for a few months before all the fundraising parties begin in the fall.

The rest of us aren’t so lucky.

This was the Procrastination Session — and when you slap together major budgets and policies at the last minute without having them vetted properly, things won’t work out how you wanted them to.

It didn’t take long for the first casualties of the 2019 session to make themselves known.

All Nevada school administrators knew that major changes in their funding formulas were being proposed, and that the governor had promised to mandate hikes in teacher pay. But to properly plan ahead, one must have an idea as to the substance of those changes as early as possible.

Because lawmakers waited until just weeks before the end of the session to even unveil the new funding proposals, and just hours until the end of the session to actually pass anything, those school administrators themselves were left to scramble to figure out how to spend the money they were given while navigating all the attached strings and red tape that money came with.

In Clark County, the results are not pretty. The superintendent announced via a pre-recorded video message that 170 administrative positions – high school and middle school deans – would be eliminated in order to comply with the required teacher raises. (Apparently, none of these employees are actually being let go, but are just being shifted into teaching jobs.)

Eliminating admin bloat and focusing personnel resources in the classroom is a very good thing and no doubt long overdue. And yes, dedicated school disciplinarians (which is a large part of the function of these deans) are administrators. School resources will ALWAYS be finite, and I would rather have more, better paid teachers than have those teachers underpaid but “supported” by dozens of people in the front office.

But eliminating positions and reassigning people via a video announcement? Could there be a more powerful way to tell your team they aren’t valued? It certainly does not speak to an organizational leadership that can be trusted to implement policy in an effective, thoughtful way. The damage to the working relationships between teachers and various levels of district administration will take years to recover. And can you imagine what will happen when and if a court strikes down $98 million in expected revenue because of illegally passed tax hikes?

And it all started because legislators couldn’t get their act together and start discussing bills on this important issue at the beginning of the session, with effects that will ultimately cascade upon children who deserve better. And just wait until the blame-shifting – which has already begun – gets started in earnest.

Sadly, public education advocates and teacher union bosses will actually reward this behavior. They will not compare this session’s amateurish school funding debacle with the 2015 Republicans’ well-planned, measured, and substantive plan to not just raise taxes but broadly diversify the funding sources in the state, and think, “Maybe we should engage those folks in good faith – maybe the political left doesn’t have a monopoly on caring for children....” Instead, they will remain tribal partisan activists for the Democrats, allowing those Democrats to take them (and their money) for granted and teaching Republicans to ignore them.

I wonder how many other industries or public employees will have to suffer through some similar debacle as a result of rushed and therefore poorly vetted policy changes? And I wonder how many will remember who helped instigate their pain, come the 2020 election?

There were many post-mortems on the 80th Legislative session last week. But the real measure of success will be if their policies – not just the ideas, but the manner in which those policies were written into law – make the lives of everyday Nevadans better or worse over the next two years. Will public education actually improve as a result of the teacher raises and other funding enhancements? Will we be safer? More free? More prosperous? Will our bureaucrats be more effective, or just more harried? Will Nevadans get better value for their tax dollars from their government than they have in the past?

We won’t really know the answers to these questions for a while. But when we do find out those answers, I hope we maintain the attention span necessary to hold the lawmakers responsible for the consequences of their actions, one way or another.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is a criminal defense attorney in Reno. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].