KVIG Informative

Nevada law created an entire state office to build STEM education into the workforce pipeline. The Nevada STEM Framework never mentions the arts by name, and schools are folding them in anyway.

STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math, an expansion of the older STEM acronym that adds creative and design disciplines to the traditional technical core. Nevada’s state government does not run a STEAM office. It runs a STEM one, created by statute, and the arts largely enter Nevada classrooms through how individual schools choose to teach the framework rather than through any state mandate.

A State Office Built by Law Nevada Revised Statute 223.600 established the Governor’s Office of Science, Innovation and Technology inside the Office of the Governor. The office’s own statement of purpose ties the mission directly to the state’s labor market: coordinating K-12 schools, higher education, workforce development programs, and employers to grow Nevada’s STEM workforce so it can meet the demands of a growing economy. The office also runs Nevada’s broadband expansion efforts, but STEM education is its founding mandate.

Each year, OSIT runs the Nevada Governor’s STEM School Designation, a formal application and site-visit process any K-12 school in the state can enter. Schools are evaluated against the Nevada STEM Framework, which OSIT’s own 2025-2026 application guide describes as rewarding interdisciplinary teaching, student identity development, and real-world workforce connections, not technical subjects taught in isolation. Schools that clear the bar get a site visit from OSIT staff in late January or early February, with designations announced in May.

Where STEAM Fits a Framework Built for STEM OSIT’s own application guide addresses the arts question directly: the Nevada STEM Framework does not call out STEAM by name, but STEAM-oriented schools can use their arts-integrated coursework as evidence toward the same designation. The guide is explicit that the designation was never meant to elevate science, technology, engineering, and math over every other subject, but to recognize schools that treat learning as connected across disciplines. That leaves room for a school built around design, music, or visual art to qualify using the exact same rubric as a school built around robotics or coding.

Walter Bracken STEAM Academy, a Clark County magnet elementary school that opened in 1962, carries the acronym directly in its name and structures its curriculum around science and math taught through hands-on, cross-disciplinary projects. It represents one working answer to a question OSIT’s own framework leaves open: what a STEAM school actually looks like when the state has only defined the STEM half of it.

The Scale in Clark County The Clark County School District carries the state’s STEM designation count. As of 2024, 27 CCSD schools held the Governor’s STEM School Designation. By 2025, CCSD schools made up more than two-thirds of all Nevada schools carrying the distinction statewide. CCSD Interim Superintendent Dr. Brenda Larsen-Mitchell said the recognition reflects the district’s commitment to a strong STEM curriculum for its students. Two CCSD educators, Dana Cuni of Southwest Career and Technical Academy and Claire Romzek of Lied STEM Academy, were separately recognized by OSIT and the Nevada Department of Education for their work leading STEM instruction.

Mark Newburn, co-chair of the Nevada STEM Advisory Council and vice president of the Nevada State Board of Education, said the state’s list of recommended STEM programs exists to raise both the quality and the quantity of STEM education Nevada children receive. That list, built with the national nonprofits Change the Equation and WestEd, gives districts a vetted menu of programs to adopt rather than leaving each school to evaluate curriculum quality on its own.

None of this answers whether Nevada should formalize the arts half of STEAM the way it has formalized STEM, with its own statute, its own office, and its own statewide designation. Right now, whether a Nevada student gets a science education woven through art, music, or design depends entirely on which school they’re zoned into, not on any standard the state has set. The framework leaves the door open. It has not yet decided to build anything permanent on the other side of it.