We begin with the Nevada Democracy Project.

It's a partnership between Vegas PBS and The Nevada Independent.

And together we're holding community listening sessions to find out what we should be reporting on.

We held our second listening session at the College of Southern Nevada's West Charleston campus.

I moderated along with Nevada Independent Reporter Naoka Foreman, who will join me after we listen to some of what was said.

-I think that there should be a push on educating voters, because educated voters are stronger voters.

-I bring my daughter to these events.

I want her to be educated.

I want her to be a part of community.

But the problem is, is that we don't invest enough money in our kids.

And we don't invest in our general community too.

Right?

Like, if we invested more into education, we wouldn't have to do as much voter education.

-I think education has really changed, and it's not for the best.

Teachers used to own their classrooms and be the leader.

If they wanted to teach reading that day and they did not understand it, they had the ability to teach it another day and reteach it for as long as they needed because they were in charge of their classrooms.

-These kids came back from the pandemic different.

Socially, emotionally, it was a lot.

And one of the things that I saw was it was really hard for schools to really punish kids for certain behaviors, because it was like, okay, it's a pandemic.

You know, things are going on at home.

This, this, that, and the other thing is happening.

And so they really weren't punishing for little or-- I mean, they really weren't punishing for anything.

So even the high aggressive, violent behaviors, they were kind of getting a slap on, slap on the hand in the beginning.

And then it got so bad that they started to have to punish for little things.

-I think college students now, this is the time that we deserve to have safety in our campuses.

-I'm a foster parent.

I brought in 36 youth, became a permanent parent to 11 of them.

And it's a huge issue.

[applause] -Thank you.

So it's kind of, in my opinion, just seen as like the forgotten youth.

It's kind of like there's never any benefits really dedicated to them.

The State tries.

They miss the mark every time.

-I think just like the big ticket items are just a bit too big for me, because I'm just a bit more worried about what's going on in the local areas.

Like, let's say floods or damages to the areas.

Because of the flood that's happened in September, there's still like construction going on in my areas.

-These nuclear issues affect all of us.

The radiation is everywhere.

It's at the bottom of Lake Mead.

It's in the older houses here in Las Vegas, and workers are going into these homes, getting exposed.

They don't even know that they're exposed.

People go out and recreate on the dry lake beds.

They park on the edge where those heavy particles bounce across and collect, and they're getting exposed, potentially.

-I think the environment is a huge one.

I think trying to start a family is very scary to me, as I'm getting older, because I don't know how the world is going to be that they're walking into.

-Something I really agreed on was that we should introduce like, civic classes into our school curriculum.

As someone who's going to go into high school quite soon, I think it's really important that we're educated on topics that will help us in the real world, like politics and dealing with our own lives and money.

-Me, as a student, and other students should be more educated about life and how it would be helpful if we could get jobs at a younger age, because it would be more helpful later on in life.

-Getting employers to work with K-12 is so important, and there's programs out there that can help foster that, that can pay for these young people to be inside of workplaces and learn and grow.

That's what they need.

-I think you should be, you could be younger to vote.

-How old do you think you should be in order to vote?

-At least 13.

-And how old are you?

-8.

-I'm really just here to listen.

I'm from American Samoa.

So unfortunately, I am a US native, so I don't get voting rights.

So to sit here and listen in these community listening sessions, it's really important for me to educate people that get a voting right to be able to-- so that my kids and my nieces and nephews that are going to come down the pathway, that they know that there are people that are going to advocate for us, because my father served 27 years in the military.

My mom, 20 years in the military.

And so not being able to vote, it's really important for me to come to a listening session like this so that you hear from me that we need you to vote.

-Ask 10 people at the caucus, Who's your State Assemblyman and who's your State Senator?

Out of those 10 people, nine of them could not tell you.

This is the first time I've seen where we have to take our election all the way down to the school board, the commissioners, that far down.

-At this point right now, I don't trust any of the candidates.

None of them are in our best interests.

Right now, what we need to focus on is what he said earlier.

It's the local.

We need to focus on our state and what we can do here because depending on the President is getting us nowhere.

As I mentioned, The Nevada Independent's Naoka Foreman moderated with me and joins us now.

Naoka, thank you for coming in.

So that was our second session.

Our first session was on the Historic West Side of Las Vegas.

And from that session, from what we heard there, we went away with that and said, Let's cover redlining and the modern day impacts of it and the modern forms of redlining.

So my question to you is based off what we heard in this second session, what are you looking forward to exploring and us possibly covering in depth?

(Naoka Foreman) Yeah.

During the conversation, school discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline came up quite a bit.

And I didn't really hear anything new.

But what stood out to me in our newsroom was that school police could potentially build up a rap sheet on students without letting parents know.

So we'll be taking a dive into that.

And also Eric Neugeboren, who came to the community listening session and he's an intern at The Inde, he'll be looking into school discipline reports before, after, and during the pandemic to see what those numbers look like.

-And that would be in direct response to that woman, a former teacher, who spoke about what she's seen in terms of discipline during those different time periods.

-Yes.

-So other issues affecting the youth that we heard, we heard from the youth themselves.

They would like civics classes.

They would like financial literacy classes.

One little boy even said, I want to learn about taxes.

Another issue that emerged from that session was the importance of voting local, not just for who's going to become the next President, but for county commission, city council, even local judges.

And it was brought up how difficult it can be to find out information about local judges.

But in that area, The Nevada Independent has a solution.

And what is that?

-Correct?

Judges decide our fate, the fate of our family members.

So judicial races are extremely important, and they're not covered much in the news.

And The Inde is trying to change that with what is called the "Judicial Project," in partnership with UNLV.

And what happens is we send judicial candidates detailed questionnaires, and we've-- detailed questionnaires, and then a panel of lawyers and law students help evaluate the candidates in the race.

We then share those profiles, which can be found on our website, along with an analysis of the race, which is written by legal experts.

-Which is so important, as you mentioned, in terms of families and issues of custody and foster care.

What a tremendous resource that The Nevada Independent is providing.

We will also be covering the ranked choice voting issue which did get brought up at this session.

There was a neat exchange between a proponent of it and then a woman who came and said, Well, I think it could have a negative impact on Presidential elections.

And right then and there, the proponent was able to correct her and say, No, this does not include Presidential elections.

This is at the state and then some Federal Office levels.

It was neat to just be able to kind of get that misconception taken care of there.

But it is a really complicated topic.

So I know we will both be looking into that more, ahead of November, when it appears back on the ballot in Nevada.

And lastly, Naoka, the right to vote itself.

We heard from that woman who said she's from America Samoa.

What do you know about why she cannot vote?

-From what I understand is that American Samoans and other people who are natives to US territories can only participate in primaries and send delegates to the nominating conventions for each party, but they don't vote in the general election.

They also have nonvoting members in the House of Representatives who can only vote on amendments.

-Wow.

-And their state-- if someone from America chooses to move to the US territories, their state can send them an absentee ballot and allow them to vote.

But the unequal voting rights in these territories stems from a 1900s idea that says that these alien races wouldn't understand Anglo-Saxon principles, and they're still affected by this idea today.

-All right.

Thank you, Naoka Foreman of The Nevada Independent, for coming on.

Look forward to having you back on.

And a couple of important dates for you to know about this election year: Tuesday, June 11, is Nevada's primary election day.

And then Tuesday, November 5, is the general election.

There are early voting options for both.

And in the meantime, we encourage you to make sure you are registered to vote.