Nevada Fee Waiver for a Purple Heart Recipient and Their Child

NRS 396.5443 is the largest education benefit in the Nevada file and it is a waiver rather than a grant, so nothing is paid to the student. The obligation is mandatory on the institution. Subsection 1: "The Board of Regents shall grant a waiver of the payment of registration fees, laboratory fees and any other mandatory fees assessed each semester against a student who is" a Purple Heart recipient or the child of one. Shall, not may, which distinguishes this section from the graduate waiver in NRS 396.5446 and the Guard waiver in NRS 396.544, both of which say may. What is covered is broader than tuition. Registration fees, laboratory fees "and any other mandatory fees assessed each semester". At Nevada institutions the per-credit registration fee is the main charge for a resident, and the catch-all for other mandatory fees sweeps in the technology, health centre and student union charges that are often excluded elsewhere. Books, housing and food are not covered. Two routes in. The veteran's own route, subsection 1(a): "A veteran of the Armed Forces of the United States who has been awarded the Purple Heart". Read what is not there. No Nevada residency requirement appears in paragraph (a), no discharge characterisation, no minimum service and no disability. The award alone carries it. The child's route, subsection 1(b), is conditional on two things: the veteran "is a bona fide resident of this State, or was a bona fide resident of this State at the time of his or her death", and "the child of the veteran graduated from a high school located in this State." So the residency requirement attaches to the child's claim rather than the veteran's, and it runs through the parent. A Purple Heart recipient who moves to Nevada opens the benefit for themselves at once, and for a child only if the child graduated from a Nevada high school. A child who finished high school in another state before the family moved does not qualify however long they then live in Nevada. Note also that the child route has no age limit written into it, which is unusual, and no requirement that the veteran be dead or disabled. The amount is last-dollar, and subsection 2 spells out the sequencing. Where the student is entitled to receive any federal educational benefits for a semester, the waiver equals "the balance of registration fees, laboratory fees and any other mandatory fees assessed against the student that remain unpaid after the student's account has been credited with the full" amount of those federal benefits. Where there are no federal benefits the waiver covers the whole assessment. That has a practical consequence worth stating plainly. A student using Post-9/11 entitlement that already covers resident fees in full will draw nothing from this waiver in that semester, and will have consumed a month of federal entitlement. A student with limited or exhausted federal entitlement gets the full value. The sensible sequence for a Purple Heart recipient with children is to work out whether to spend federal entitlement or the state waiver first, since the state waiver does not expire and federal entitlement does. The section also authorises a more favourable waiver. Its heading refers to "authorization to grant more favorable waiver", so the Board of Regents may go beyond the statutory minimum, which means an institution's own policy is worth asking about rather than assuming the statute is the ceiling. The heading further refers to a "limitation on certain uses of waiver", so a student should confirm with the campus financial aid office which programmes and course types the waiver may be applied to before enrolling. Three companion waivers sit in the same run of sections and are covered separately in this catalog: the Nevada National Guard waiver in NRS 396.544, the waiver for the spouse or child of a prisoner of war or service member missing in action in NRS 396.5445, and the graduate degree waiver for a veteran in NRS 396.5446.