Choice Isn’t Choice If You Can’t Get There

How Do We Get There From Here?

Eight years ago, Nevada’s Clark County School District decided it needed to get better at marketing. Charter enrollment was growing, CCSD enrollment had fallen below projections, and the district created a six-figure marketing position. Then-Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky argued that the position would pay for itself if it brought back roughly 25 students each year. April Corbin Girnus reported on that debate for the Nevada Current in 2018.

So when I read Girnus’s recent reporting that CCSD would reimburse some families up to $1,000 to drive their children to another district school, I thought I recognized the next step in that story. First, market your schools. Then expand and broaden access to attractive magnet and choice programs. Now, reduce the transportation cost associated with choosing one.

In an environment of declining enrollment, excess seats and growing charter enrollment, perhaps CCSD was spending $1,000 to keep a student inside the district rather than lose that student altogether.

It is an interesting interpretation. I am no longer convinced it is the most important one. The more I dug into the legislative, regulatory and funding history, the more this looked like an equity story. More specifically, it looked like a story about what it actually takes to build a functioning portfolio of public-school choices.

The 2018 debate also raised legitimate equity questions, including whether Nevada’s charter sector reflected the communities it served. That gap was real, and we made meaningful progress during my time leading the State Public Charter School Authority. But that history deserves its own post. The narrower point here is that marketing alone does not make school choice equitable.

CCSD’s magnets and career and technical academies faced their own access questions. Some of the district’s most attractive programs did not reflect the broader community, and admissions requirements prevented some students from competing for seats. CCSD subsequently expanded access, recruited more deliberately in underrepresented communities and eliminated admissions criteria for many programs. Those changes mattered.

But families still had to get their children to school, and that is not a small problem in Nevada.

Pat Skorkowsky frequently reminded his mostly rural superintendent colleagues that CCSD was itself Nevada’s largest rural school district. Pat was not claiming Clark had the most acreage. Nye and Elko, for example, are both considerably larger. His point was that CCSD had to operate as an urban, suburban and rural school system at the same time.

They also dealt with distances and operating constraints that are difficult to appreciate from a conference room, particularly one on the East Coast.

Clark County covers approximately 7,892 square miles of land, roughly the size of Massachusetts. CCSD serves dense Las Vegas neighborhoods as well as places such as Moapa, Searchlight, Laughlin and Indian Springs. Those distances complicate any easy comparison between district and charter transportation.

CCSD operates a massive transportation system organized largely around geographically assigned schools. It also provides a specialized transportation model for magnet schools. Students may qualify for magnet transportation when they live within the designated transportation zone and more than two miles from the school. That is why magnet students are excluded from the new reimbursement program. The district already provides transportation for eligible magnet students.

Open-enrollment students, by contrast, generally have not been eligible for transportation.

Charter schools face a different network problem because they do not have attendance zones. A single charter campus might enroll students scattered throughout Clark County. A commitment to transport every student beyond walking distance could mean contemplating trips from Moapa to Henderson or from Searchlight to North Las Vegas.

When I led Nevada’s charter school authority, I repeatedly encountered the view among senior state education officials that a charter could not offer transportation to only some students. Nobody ever tested that interpretation in court. Maybe it would not have survived. But organizations make decisions based on regulatory risk before a judge tells them who was right.

For a charter school, starting one targeted route carried the possibility that it would be told to serve every similarly situated student across the county. In practice, regulatory uncertainty functioned much like a prohibition.

Money was another obstacle. I do not want to turn this into a broader discussion of whether charter schools received equitable funding under either the Nevada Plan or the Pupil-Centered Funding Plan. The narrower fact is enough. When I led the authority, charters had no dedicated transportation funding. A school willing to assume the regulatory risk had to pay for transportation from the same general operating dollars that also covered facilities and other costs.

The PCFP later created a separate transportation allocation for school districts but not charter schools. Until 2023, most Nevada charter schools did not simply choose not to provide transportation. They lacked a dedicated funding stream, and they faced a potentially ruinous interpretation of what offering even limited transportation might obligate them to do.

Assembly Bill 400 addressed more than the absence of money. It appropriated $7 million in each year of the 2023–2025 biennium and gave the State Public Charter School Authority explicit authority to approve transportation plans that were comprehensive, financially viable and likely to materially improve access within a region.

In practice, that allowed schools to start with a small number of routes, vehicles or centralized stops without treating countywide transportation as the only legally safe model. By 2025, 23 charter holders serving 27 campuses were using the grants. Eighty-seven percent of the participating campuses were Title I schools.

The new CCSD reimbursement program comes from a separate 2025 legislative effort. Assembly Bill 533 established statewide district open-enrollment requirements and created a transportation-assistance pathway for eligible students attending district schools outside their assigned attendance zones. Senate Bill 460 supplied $7 million for one year of transportation support.

Torres-Fossett deserves particular credit for carrying AB 533, and her career complicates any attempt to sort this story into district and charter teams. One of the people who addressed this district-choice equity problem came out of Nevada’s charter-school community. That should not be surprising. In our polarized education debates, it often is.

A serious public-school portfolio is not merely a collection of neighborhood schools, magnets, career and technical academies and charters listed together on a website. Families need to know the options exist. They need a fair opportunity to obtain a seat. They also need a practical way to get their children there.

The new CCSD program is limited. Reimbursement assumes that someone has a reliable vehicle and the time to drive. It may also require families to carry the expense until reimbursement arrives. The program will remove a barrier for some families. It will not create equal access for everyone.

Transportation also does not make a school good. Families can persist at weak schools because alternatives remain inaccessible. Enrollment and retention tell us something, but neither is a complete measure of quality. Still, transportation changes what those signals can tell us.

Schools must increasingly earn enrollment, persistence, trust and positive word of mouth. But systems should not mistake enrollment constrained by geography for enrollment earned through quality. Before enrollment can be earned, choice has to be reachable. Once transportation stops making the decision for families, what will their choices teach us?

Nevada has begun answering the practical question beneath every promise of public-school choice: How do families get there from here?