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Lawmakers discussed that steep price as they considered SB145, a bill to create the Battle Born Opportunity Grant. The program would fill a gap in the state’s financial aid offerings, which currently include the merit-based Millennium Scholarship and two need-based programs geared primarily toward community college students.

Lawmakers will end their work week with hearings Friday on standardized testing overload, refining the response to people in a mental health crisis and providing more need-based aid to university students.

The report, which is up for discussion in the Senate Education Committee on Friday, came about after lawmakers requested it through SB303 in the 2017 session. The bill’s sponsor, Democratic Sen. Joyce Woodhouse, said the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act began an era of testing that has gotten out of hand.

But amid a relatively slow first three weeks (outside a contentious gun background check bill), lawmakers are preparing for a potentially major legal opinion from legislative legal staff that could have significant implications for Gov. Steve Sisolak’s $8.8 billion budget and the rest of the session.

Legislative committees are focusing less on bills and more on presentations on Thursday, with plans to hear about the performance of Nevada’s marijuana taxes, the state’s early childhood education system and regional transportation authorities.

Efforts to fund the ESA program, which was derailed by a legal challenge after it was created in 2015, were unsuccessful in 2017 even when there were more Republican lawmakers and a supportive governor.

In testimony for her 2017 private prison ban bill, she argued that private prisons have a perverse incentive to keep inmates behind bars longer rather than rehabilitate them, and supporters of her bill argued that private prison operations are less transparent than when they are under state control.

Drug companies, on the heels of a bitter fight over insulin pricing transparency legislation two years ago, more than doubled the campaign cash they doled out to Nevada lawmakers and parties in the 2018 election cycle and extended an invitation to legislative leaders to attend a biennial private fundraiser in California’s Napa Valley.

Lawmakers are hearing bills aimed at fixing issues with ID cards for prisoners, prohibiting employers from not hiring someone because they test positive for marijuana and a pilot program for adult day care and assisted living services in rural Nevada.

Several Democratic lawmakers are working on proposals to ban bump stocks — a firearm accessory that mimics automatic weapons fire, used in the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas — as well as creating penalties for leaving a firearm accessible to children and allowing municipalities to set their own regulations on guns. But it’s still unclear whether lawmakers will move to address Sisolak’s campaign promises to ban assault rifles and silencers.

Health insurance companies may soon be required to cover out-of-network doctor’s visits at no additional cost to patients if no in-network physician is readily accessible under a new proposal put forward by Assemblywoman Ellen Spiegel.

Introduced Monday, SB167 would amend the definitions of a “public utility” and “net metering” in Nevada law to enable renewable generating stations in an apartment or multi-family dwelling to tap into the state’s current net metering program.

Lawmakers will get a crash course on education funding and Nevada’s property tax system on Tuesday, in addition to considering the idea of speed-detecting cameras to help enforce the law. Here’s what to watch for on Tuesday at the Legislature.

Neonatal doctors, hospitals and donor breast milk companies testified Monday in favor of a bill they said would greatly reduce the number of premature babies in Nevada that die from serious intestinal disease, though questions remain over the cost of the proposal.

Dozens of teachers, parents and education advocates braved chilly weather Monday to call for a new funding formula that would replace the 1967 version. The request has been at the forefront of education policy discussions the last few legislative cycles, but a revamped formula hasn’t fully emerged.

“It was really meant for volunteers that were there on an ongoing basis and that were unsupervised,” Gansert said in an interview about her 2017 bill. “And when that went out to the school districts, when it was to be enforced, there were all sorts of different interpretations of who should be getting background checks among the volunteers.”

Although NDOC spokeswoman Brooke Santina couldn’t provide exact figures on how many inmates had been released with no ID, the agency releases about 6,200 people a year, so Dzurenda’s estimate of 50 percent would mean more than 3,000 inmates are leaving without one each year.

After a week dominated by debate and votes on a major gun background checks bill, state lawmakers are set to return to their normal schedule of bill hearings on Monday.