Teenagers could be protected from working late-night shifts before school days, thanks to a bipartisan trio of lawmakers and a group of high schoolers who say businesses are exploiting them.

would prohibit high school teenagers from working between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. before a school day. Teens aged 14 and 15 are already prohibited by from working between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., but the Nevada proposed law would put in place restrictions for 16-, 17- and 18-year olds who are enrolled in public or private school.

Emancipated teenagers, lifeguards, arcade workers, farm workers, and theatrical performers would be exempt from the hourly restrictions. Additional exemptions could be granted on a case-by-base basis.

The bill would also lower the maximum number of hours a child under 16 can work: from 48 to 40 hours per week.

“Every single day in my classes I have kids who are too tired to participate,” said Matt Nighswonger, a teacher at Shadow Ridge High School on the northern edge of the Las Vegas Valley. “When I wake them up and ask them why they’re so tired, they tell me they had to close, or had to work late last night. Many of them have to work until 1 or 2 in the morning.”

The business community, he said, is taking advantage of vulnerable teenagers.

“As a government teacher, I try to teach my students that the government is here to protect its citizens,” he added. “AB215 helps to protect our exploited high school workers.”

Karissa Murdoch was one of those teens. The Shadow Ridge senior began working at a local ice rink at 15. She started with a reasonable workload, then she asked for more hours because she wanted more money, then she was asked by her bosses to stay late after her official shift to do extra work.

That’s how she found herself regularly working until midnight Monday through Thursday. After the commute home, eating and showering, she was going to bed at 1 or 2 a.m. and sleeping a paltry few hours before school started up again at 7 a.m.

Her grades slipped. She says she went from being a student who “almost never turned in an assignment late” to a student who couldn’t stay awake in class and turned in everything late. Murdoch said she came to her senses on her own and now wants to advocate for her younger self.

“At 15, I was nowhere near mature enough to prioritize school over money,” she told Assembly members during the bill’s first hearing, which she traveled to Carson City for over spring break in March. “I wish the adults around me would have thought about more than just using me for business gain.”

Teagan Clark, another Shadow Ridge student, testified that working closing shift meant driving home late at night tired — a potentially dangerous scenario for anyone but especially an inexperienced driver. It also resulted in her skipping breakfast in order to get an extra few minutes of sleep, drinking too many caffeine-filled energy drinks, and feeling isolated socially.

Nighswonger said he surveyed working high school seniors at Shadow Ridge and found that 48% regularly work past 10 p.m. on school nights. Many of the students were worried they would lose their job if they shared their own stories, though a few hand-wrote letters for him to deliver to lawmakers.

“I work at a car wash and every night we close at 8 and I stay after hours to clean the vacuum trays and sewage out of the tunnel where the cars are washed,” read one. “It’s too much for a 17 year old kid, but I don’t want to lose my job.”

Equipo Academy Assistant Principal Erik Van Houten said a quarter of 16- and 17-year-olds at the East Las Vegas charter school have jobs, and 1 in 5 of them work over 40 hours a week.

“These students are ill equipped to advocate for themselves to leave work at reasonable hours,” he said. “Many are holding their very first job.”

AB215, he continued, would ”put guardrails in place to protect our kids and make clear that a high school education should be their number one priority.”

Nighswonger, Murdoch and other Shadow Ridge students pitched the proposed law to Democratic Assemblymember Daniele Monroe-Moreno and Republican Assemblymember Brian Hibbetts, whose districts cover the school’s enrollment area. Both signed on to sponsor a bill on the issue.

Independently, Democratic Assemblymember Cinthia Zermeño Moore was working on similar legislation inspired by concerns raised by Van Houten from Equipo, which is located in her district.The three Assembly members decided to combine their bills and work together.

Strong support, but some concerns raised

AB215 passed the Nevada State Assembly with unanimous bipartisan support earlier this month and is now making its way through the Senate. If passed, the bill will head to Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo’s desk for final approval.

Hibbetts acknowledged that some might see the inclusion of protections for 18-year-olds as a problem because it means they are being considered adults in some legal contexts and not adults in others. But he said there is precedent.

High school students are not allowed to sign off on their own school paperwork just because they turn 18 during their senior year, he said. They still need parental signatures.

“This is, in my vision, just going along with that same type of mentality,” he said. “I think this is something that we need to offer them. Just because you’re 18, it doesn’t mean your employer can make you work until 2 a.m. because you have to be at school at 7 a.m.”

Monroe-Moreno added that the inclusion of 18-year-olds was specifically asked for by Shadow Ridge students who said their managers target them for late shifts because they are 18.

Several lawmakers in the bill’s two hearings raised concerns about the impact the legislation might have on lower income families whose teens contribute to essential household bills.

Moore said she understands that reality, adding that her first job was at age 14 selling CDs at the Indoor Swap Meet in East Las Vegas. But she argued the state needs to support students with their education because, without it, “they may not be able to seek the opportunities they may have” that could lift them, and their families, upward.

Teresa Benitez-Thompson, a former state lawmaker, spoke in personal support of the bill, saying she wished such restrictions were in place two decades ago when she was a teenage hostess whose paychecks helped support her single mom, who worked as a waitress, and her sister, who was a teen mom at 15. She said she fell behind her junior year and had to do credit recovery to get back on track.

“A low-wage job for a teenager is not going to solve poverty,” she said. “Education is what breaks the cycle of poverty. Education is absolutely what has to be prioritized.”

Groups in support of AB218 included the Vegas Chamber, Nevada Resorts Association, NAACP, City of North Las Vegas, and ACLU.

No groups publicly opposed AB218 during its two bill hearings, but the Nevada Restaurant Association testified in neutral.

“We support efforts to balance student well being and academics with valuable work experience,” the group’s lobbyist, Peter Saba, said. “Many restaurants rely on student workers, and we encourage ongoing discussions to ensure these small businesses can adapt smoothly.”

Monroe-Moreno acknowledged that concessions were made to appease business groups. The bill originally sought to prohibit teens from working past 10 p.m. on school nights but the time was amended to 11 p.m.

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In January, the University of California Board of Regents broke the hearts of undocumented students by halting a proposal to allow them to work on campus. A few days later, David Alvarez had a plan.

The  huddled with student organizers and decided to draft a bill to compel the UC, as well as the community colleges and California State University, to do what the UC regents would not.

Federal law prohibits employers from hiring anyone who is undocumented, but Alvarez’s  says California’s public colleges and universities should be exempt and allowed to hire undocumented students for on-campus jobs. The approach rests on an untested legal theory . It’s based on the argument that a pivotal federal  doesn’t apply to state agencies, including public colleges and universities.

Assemblymember , a Corona Democrat and chair of the California Latino Legislative Caucus, has introduced a  that, if passed, would be taken to CA voters in the form of a ballot measure.

Both bills are . 

“We wouldn’t have to do this if the federal government actually did their job and passed immigration reform,” said Alvarez in an interview with CalMatters.   

Instead of working on-campus jobs like their peers, undocumented students must seek employment as independent contractors or find under-the-table jobs, . If Alvarez’s bill prevails, an estimated 60,000 undocumented students could benefit.

Last May, the UC Board of Regents  the plan to allow undocumented students to work. In January, the regents reversed course, voting 10 to 6 to delay any implementation by a year. , who sobbed in the public meeting space, castigated the regents and reverted to an agonizing square one in which they lacked the legal right to work.

Alvarez’s bill cleared its first hurdle in April, but it faces a  during an opaque legislative process known as , in which members of the appropriations committee decide in relative secrecy whether bills with a price tag advance or die.

A  the bill could cost California a few million dollars to implement these hiring changes and to handle the legal fees, should someone decide to sue a college or university for hiring undocumented students.  Those costs could become a large obstacle as the .

How much of an impact the bill would have on undocumented students is an open question: Most students — regardless of their immigration status — work off campus. Federal law is clear that private employers must follow the employment ban. The bills by Alvarez and Cervantes do not extend to the many other state agencies where undocumented students could work after graduation and earn competitive wages.

‘It is not fair’

For Alvarez, the bill is a continuation of California’s commitment to for undocumented students. Already the , grants and loans to these students, but they’re barred from receiving federal dollars. A campus job would allow them to cover the difference when financial aid falls short; it would help them with major expenses like housing, transportation and food.

“I’m out here fighting for the right to be given the opportunity to apply to a job on campus,” said Karely Amaya Rios . The 23-year-old is a graduate student at UCLA and has a pending job offer from a professor to help him write a book and teach his immigrant rights courses. Though she’s lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, she’s undocumented and ineligible for the job. “It is not fair,” she said.

Rios  that she cobbles together enough money to cover rent and food costs by babysitting and selling clothes at a swap meet with her mother. She also receives some scholarships and stipends.

“I fear that all of you do not understand how disappointing and gut-wrenching it feels to be denied my humanity and my right to access the same opportunities as my peers,” added Fatima Zeferino, an undocumented Cal State Long Beach student, at the April hearing.

���������Գٱ��’&�Բ�����; would target just the UC, a potentially necessary move because the UC is . The Legislature’s bills can rarely force the system to do something.

Still, Alvarez’s office believes the UC “would be bound” by his bill, his district director, Lisa Schmidt, wrote in an email. She added that “even if it were not formally bound it would comply with the law once the Cal State and (community colleges) were doing so.”

Why public colleges are worried

The UC isn’t formally opposed to the bill, but its  the bill could expose UC hiring managers to civil and criminal prosecution and jeopardize the billions of dollars in federal research grants the university receives. Alvarez bristled at one objection the UC raised: that the bill as law could expose “undocumented students and their families to the possibility of criminal prosecution or deportation.” He called that “borderline offensive to students” who already have to navigate the legal complexities of their immigration status outside of school.  

Alvarez cited his own experience as a child born in the U.S. living in fear of what would happen to his undocumented parents. They were eventually granted legal status through the same 1986 federal law that now bars undocumented residents from working. 

Hovering in plain sight is the concern that a potential Trump White House would wage an aggressive legal attack on the university. It would potentially repeat a judicial system showdown that saw the university  to end job protections for undocumented workers who came to the country when they were young. That previous legal saga involved the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, but federal courts  halted the federal government’s ability to accept new applications.

The UC Office of the President never appeared persuaded by the legal argument put forward by the UCLA scholars. It sought outside legal opinion, and the conclusion was that the plan wouldn’t be “legally viable,” .

UC’s April letter to legislators underscored that worry: “However, after receiving advice from both inside and outside legal counsel, we concluded that there were considerable risks for the University and the students we aim to support.”

Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the two UCLA legal scholars behind the theory that state agencies are exempt from the federal rule barring undocumented residents from working,  that no hiring manager could be prosecuted if universities began hiring undocumented students.

“The risk that people would actually be criminally prosecuted for following state law is, in my view, vanishingly small,” he said then. “And we’re not aware of any example where people have been criminally prosecuted by the federal government for following a law that they were required to follow as a matter of the state.”

More likely is that the state would be sued and the matter would play out in courts, Arulanantham said. “If the universities lost that lawsuit and they still kept trying to hire people, of course that would present a different question.”

The state’s attorney general would defend the campuses in those suits, Alvarez said. The press office of the attorney general wouldn’t comment on Arulanantham’s legal argument or whether the attorney general would defend the campuses in a possible suit.

Cal State has issued no position, though it reiterated another point the UC made: The bill “could have consequences on the federal aid the CSU and our students receive,” wrote Amy Bentley-Smith, a spokesperson for Cal State. The fear isn’t unfounded. When the UC system weighed the issue, Republican Congressman Darell Issa asking that he “please inform Congress how the system intends to refund its current federal funding, as well as provide a detailed estimate of the fiscal impact to students by foregoing future federal assistance.”

Can community college students benefit?

While the legal risk of the bill looms large, the impact of the legislation on undocumented students may be limited in scope. That’s because the majority of undocumented students attend community college. The Cal State system has fewer undocumented students, and the UC campuses have the least, according to  from each system. 

Yet community college students are the least likely to work on-campus jobs. When they do work, only 7% of them have a campus job, according to an analysis provided by California Student Aid Commission. The rates are higher at Cal State and UC campuses, where 16% of working students at Cal State and about half of working students at the UC are employed on campus.

Many community college students work full time in the private sector, whereas campus jobs typically restrict students to no more than 20 hours a week. The hourly limit comes from research that says . 

Over the past six years, Jerry Reyes has studied at Reedley College, just south of Fresno, though he left at various points. He’s undocumented and ineligible for DACA, which offers temporary work permits for undocumented youth. 

He worked anyway, taking a job at an agricultural packaging house, where he made around $15 an hour. They “didn’t really ask” about his immigration status, he said. 

Better jobs are hard to find, he said. “I just ignore potential opportunities because I know they’re just going to turn me away because of my status.”

After a brief stint at San Francisco State, he returned to Reedley College, where he’s pursuing a new major in business administration and serving as a trustee on the community college district’s board. The position is supposed to pay $375 per month, but he said the district won’t compensate him because of his immigration status.

“It’s frustrating,” Reyes said, to watch others get paid for student jobs when he does the same amount of work. He supports Alvarez’s bill but he wants a broader solution too. “A lot of these (undocumented) students don’t work campus jobs,” he said, “and even the jobs they take don’t pay as well.”

Alvarez said he’d consider future legislation to open job opportunities in other sectors too, but not before passing this legislation. “Look, this is already a heavy lift,” he said. “It’s not going to be easy.”

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