KVIG Informative

A tribal school on the Nevada-Idaho border has waited three years for the state money it was promised, while officials in Las Vegas break ground on new campuses without a second thought.

The Owyhee Combined School sits on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, home to the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes, along the remote stretch of Elko County where Nevada meets Idaho. The Bureau of Indian Affairs built it in 1954. It has never been replaced.

The building sits on contaminated ground. Tribal doctors have documented a string of cancer deaths on the reservation and are studying a possible link to hydrocarbon plumes near the school site. A bat colony lives in the rafters. Tribal Chairman Brian Mason says the building floods classrooms with cold on “many, many days” each year, forcing staff to send children home.

The Money That Wasn’t Enough In June 2023, Gov. Joe Lombardo signed a bill sponsored by Democratic Assemblywoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno appropriating $64.5 million to build a new Owyhee Combined School. The law also opened two capital accounts, $25 million for rural school construction statewide and another $25 million reserved specifically for schools on tribal land. At the signing, Vice Principal Lynn Manning-John told the crowd that the old building was designed under a policy of “kill the Indian and save the man,” and that it no longer served the community it was built to erase.

The $64.5 million only covered the main building. The original law required Elko County to add a new property tax to fund the rest, with the state matching what was raised. Elko County sued over that tax and won, leaving the school’s completion in legal limbo.

Mason and Monroe-Moreno went back to Carson City. In 2025 they introduced Assembly Bill 355, which lets tribes donate directly to the Owyhee school fund and has the state match those donations instead of relying on the contested county tax. “This is a rural Nevada problem,” Mason told lawmakers, noting the funding structure that starved Owyhee has starved tribal and rural schools across the state.

Construction bids on the new building initially drew no offers, a consequence of building in one of the most remote inhabited parts of Nevada. The tribes built temporary housing and a laundromat just to house a construction workforce large enough to finish the job. The Shoshone-Paiute Tribes now expect the new school to open in late spring 2027, four years after the funding was first signed into law.

A Statewide Funding Gap Nevada funds school construction primarily through local property taxes, a model that works in Clark County, where a growing tax base has financed a wave of new campuses in Las Vegas and Henderson. It does not work in a town of a few hundred people on a reservation with almost no private property tax base to draw from. The Nevada Department of Education’s Office of Indian Education, run by Education Programs Professional Fredina Drye-Romero, exists precisely to manage the gap between what the state provides and what tribal students in Nevada actually receive, coordinating between school districts and the state’s federally recognized tribes under a formal consultation process created by the 2023 legislature.

Nationally, the Bureau of Indian Education runs a separate system of 183 elementary and secondary schools across 64 reservations in 23 states, including Nevada, plus dozens of schools operated directly by tribes and tribal school boards under federal grants. Duckwater Shoshone Elementary and Pyramid Lake High School are both part of that federal system inside Nevada’s borders. Owyhee Combined, by contrast, falls under the Elko County School District, which means its fate depends on a rural county government with a shrinking tax base rather than a federal agency built to serve reservation schools directly.

Every legislative session that Owyhee’s funding stays unresolved is another class of students who spend their K-12 years under a leaking, bat-infested roof built during an era when federal policy toward the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes and other Native nations was explicitly designed for assimilation. The building will eventually come down. The funding formula that let it stand for seventy years is still on the books.

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