(John Burke | Better Nevada PAC) – Democrat Assemblywoman Selena La Rue Hatch is so desperate to weaken school choice in Nevada, she’s resorted to telling outright lies about it. Yesterday in an interview on KNPR, La Rue Hatch was asked about Nevada’s Opportunity Scholarship program – which serves low-income children across the state and allows them to attend safer schools where they can get the education they deserve. La Rue Hatch stated:
“The majority of people that are taking advantage of that program are wealthy individuals who were already sending their kids to private schools. And so I have a deep issue with us subsidizing wealthy individuals to continue what they were already able to afford and already able to do… we are looking at tightening up that program because clearly I don’t think it should exist at all in the first place…”
While La Rue Hatch claims that “the majority” of Opportunity Scholarships go to wealthy families who can afford private schools, the data shows that the vast majority of recipients are from households that earn substantially less than Nevada’s median income. According to the Nevada Department of Education’s 2023 report on Opportunity Scholarships, the average recipient of an Opportunity Scholarship’s average household income was just over $55,000.
That means the average household recipient of an opportunity scholarship last year in Nevada made significantly less than the median income of the state ($72,333), according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Also, according to the Nevada Department of Education, recipients of Opportunity Scholarships cannot be from households whose incomes exceed 300 percent of federal poverty guidelines, making wealthy families ineligible for the program.
Nevada Democrats reduced the budget for Opportunity Scholarships by roughly half in 2023 and voted along party lines to reject a temporary fix put forward by Governor Lombardo to ensure existing scholarships receive funding. La Rue Hatch celebrated this move by her colleagues. To make matters worse, earlier this year the oldest Catholic School in Las Vegas announced it would be forced to shut down, attributing their decision to lack of funding for Opportunity Scholarships.
La Rue Hatch makes it clear that she does not want this program to exist at all and that she is looking at “tightening” it up, indicating that she wishes to further cut it, leaving more of Nevada’s low-income children without access to these resources.
La Rue Hatch’s eagerness to get rid of a program that serves hundreds of low-income Nevada children – and her willingness to spread outright falsehoods about it – shows she can’t be trusted to stand for our kids.
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