Ronica Spute was fifty-fucking-seven years old before she could afford to go to college full time. Before the tuition waiver, she was doing what working people do — scraping together a class here, a class there, watching a degree take twice as long as it should because the money wasn’t there. Then Nevada passed a waiver for Native American students and suddenly she could study every day instead of worrying about whether she could pay. Two years. Bachelor’s degree. UNLV.
The program started with 170 students. Now it’s nearly 700. It quadrupled in four years. It works.
And its future is “murky.”
Not broken. Not defrauded. Not wasting your tax dollars. Working. Growing. Opening doors for people this country spent a few centuries nailing shut. A fifty-seven-year-old woman from the Moapa Band of Paiutes got her degree because someone finally built a door she could walk through, and now the state that owes her community more than it will ever repay can’t even promise the funding will be there next year.
This is the pattern. Build something that works for the people this country exploited the hardest, watch it succeed, then let the money get “uncertain” until the program dies quietly enough that nobody has to vote against it on camera. It’s not a budget crisis. It’s a goddamn moral vacancy — a state that will fund a football stadium before it funds a doorway for a fifty-seven-year-old Native woman trying to learn.
She waited fifty-seven years. The least Nevada can do is keep the goddamn door open.
Source story: Nevada Native American tuition waiver grows from 170 to nearly 700.