Starting Nov. 1, New Mexico will offer free child care to every family in the state. There will be no fees to pay and no income limits to sign up, according to the Early Childhood Education and Care Department.

State leaders and newspapers across the country claim it as the first universal child care paid for by a state.

People who support the program say it will help parents keep their jobs, give child care workers better pay, and make the economy stronger — adding it will also help the state’s youngest children who get the care.

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“The well-being of kids is tied to the well-being of the adults in their lives,” said Dr. Philip Fisher, a professor of early childhood at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. “And adults’ well-being depends on their economic circumstances.”

But there’s a problem. New Mexico might not have enough child care centers to actually take care of all the children whose families want help. There simply aren’t enough spots available, especially for babies and families living out in smaller towns.

The state has gradually helped more families with child care assistance since 2019. By 2023, families making 400% of the federal poverty level were able to get help, opening the program to more middle- and higher-income families.

Right now, about 27,000 children across the state get child care, according to the Legislative Finance Committee’s����on Early Childhood. Officials think another 12,000 children will join the program when it becomes universal.

But the committee found, as of this year prior to the new subsidy going into effect, there were only enough openings for about one out of every three babies under age two. The shortage was even worse in rural counties where almost no licensed infant care exists.

The number of child care spots dropped by 3% between 2019 and 2023. That’s mostly because the number of people providing child care in their homes dropped by half, according to����from the Cradle to Career Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico. Most of the drop����in unlicensed home-based care—places that were simply registered as providers.

Not counting those home providers that closed, the numbers would show more licensed child care centers, which have higher quality ratings from the state. But home-based providers are more likely to offer care at night or in a family’s native language. With so many of them gone, families who work night shifts or want someone who speaks their language may have a harder time finding the right fit, according to the institute. It’s worth noting that the share of assistance going to families at or below the poverty line fell by nearly 3% between 2019 and 2023.

State officials know there are not enough child care options and have announced a $12.7 million fund that offers low-interest loans to build new centers or fix up old ones. They plan to ask lawmakers for another $20 million. The growth will focus on care for babies and toddlers, low-income families, and children with special needs. The state is also working with businesses and schools to open more locations and is trying to recruit new people to run child care in their homes.

To keep workers, state officials plan to pay child care centers more money so they can cover their real costs. Programs that pay staff at least $18 an hour and stay open 10 hours a day, five days a week will qualify for incentive rates.The state plans to boost child care in underserved communities by making sure workers get fair pay and by using data to make smart choices, said Elizabeth Groginsky, secretary of the Early Childhood Education and Care Department.

Fair wages can help child care workers think of early education as a real career instead of just a temporary job. That means they can build lasting relationships with the children and families they serve, Groginsky said. “We use data to drive our decisions. We just completed a supply-and-demand study with interactive maps showing which parts of the state have the largest gaps. That will guide how we fund applications through the new loan program.”

Even with those plans, questions remain about who will benefit most and how much difference the system will make for children.

While supporters say universal child care is a win for families and the economy, Republican lawmakers����that removing income limits means taxpayers will now help pay for child care for wealthy families.

Legislative Finance Committee analysts have also questioned the program’s impact on learning. Their 2025 report found that while child care meets an essential need for working families, it does not have the same effect on kindergarten readiness as public pre-kindergarten programs.

But Fisher said the benefits go beyond teaching ABCs and 123s.

Stable, predictable, caring relationships are the foundation of healthy learning and development, he said. That matters more than exposing young children to math or reading skills that they will pick up anyway once they start school.

Healthy child development has more to do with relationships than what kind of child care you use, he said.

“There is not like a prevailing amount of evidence that having a child in a kinder care situation is going to lead the child to be a college graduate [versus] having them cared for by the lady down the street or in your apartment complex is going to lead them to end up, you know, incarcerated,” Fisher said.

Fisher also questioned whether the market alone can give families what they need.

“It’s a broken market,” he said. Parents can’t afford what high-quality care actually costs, employers don’t usually help cover it, and providers often don’t make enough to live on.

When adults are stressed about money, he said, it directly affects children.

“It’s easy to imagine that if you’re an adult who’s taking care of a young child, that if you yourself are worried about not having enough food for you to feed your family, or you’re skipping meals so you can feed the children, or you’re worried about eviction, or you can’t pay for health care, that those things weigh on you and that they take away from your ability to really buffer your child from what’s going on around them,” he said.

Groginsky said the stakes are high.

“The first five years is the fastest period of human development, with over a million new brain connections per second in a baby’s brain,” she said in an interview. “It’s those responsive, nurturing relationships that drive positive outcomes.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Goldberg for questions: info@sourcenm.com.

As leaders in early childhood education whose organizations represent those working across the broad spectrum of care environments, we are united in our support of New Mexico’s approach to addressing the that long has vexed policymakers, providers and parents alike. By designing and funding a system that is “both/and” rather than “either/or,” the state is addressing the needs of families and providers across center-based, home-based, school-based and friend, family, and neighbor (FFN) care settings.

We are also energized by what other states can — and should — learn from New Mexico’s progress. 

The state has taken a series of policy and funding actions over the past six years that have led it to create a for early childhood, approve a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to early education and eventually announce plans to make universal child care a reality. Others can learn lessons from these actions about how to strengthen their own child care systems, whether by making them more robust or even building a path to universal child care, so they can see the benefits in their own backyard.

The reality is that families in the U.S. rely on a fragile child care ecosystem, one that is often cobbled together to reflect each family’s unique needs, schedules and goals. But one thing all families share is a desire for their young children to be safe, happy, healthy and learning — no matter where they are. So a universal child care plan offering true choice is a win for everyone, as New Mexicans soon will experience.

Over the years, a key priority for the state’s policymakers has been increasing the supply of quality child care by supporting educators and caregivers. New Mexico has made advancements including raising wages for early educators and increasing reimbursements rates for those who take subsidies. The universal child care system’s foundation will be built on growing the number of well-compensated, well-prepared, well-supported providers across all settings.

that it needs another 5,000 early learning professionals, and the state pledges to grow the field by, among other things, building on years of investment in the education, preparation and compensation of early childhood educators. The state is committed to meeting parents and providers where they are, including by providing resources and support in multiple languages. The state will also offer low-interest loans for facility expansion; partner with school districts and employers to expand options for working families; launch a campaign to recruit licensed and registered home-based child care providers; make it easier for relative caregivers to participate in state programs; and increase reimbursement rates to programs to reflect the true cost of care, including incentivizing programs that offer a wage scale beginning at $18 per hour.

The bottom line is that there will be multiple entry points and advancement opportunities for early childhood educators along with strong support for caregivers under New Mexico’s new system — and each of those will create more supply of quality care options for babies and young children. 

We believe that this is how universal child care can and should work. Families, regardless of income, have the option to choose the setting that works for them while states strengthen and fund the entire continuum of care and education by prioritizing the people who provide it.

Success in New Mexico will require continued investment from the state legislature, ongoing collaboration between provider and caregiver communities, and efforts to expand access to high-quality child care environments. And it will require a continuation of the kind of advocacy, bold leadership and grassroots activism the state’s early childhood educators, caregivers and families led for years, which helped lead the state to this groundbreaking step.

For too long, families and policymakers have been faced with impossible decisions about whether to prioritize affordable care or quality child care, and how to support providers across a variety of places where early care and education happen. New Mexico’s step aims to put that to an end.

We have every confidence that New Mexico will make it work and demonstrate that there is a path forward in advancing toward universal child care. Every state with a child care crisis — and that’s all of them — can embrace the successes that come from New Mexico’s effort to support early educators and caregivers, which illustrates what’s possible when we come together for children and families.

A recent college graduate from Kansas, Phipps chose the district, which is about 45 miles east of Denver, because of an unusual job perk: housing for school staff. The district-owned apartments offer monthly rent starting at $200. Phipps, who still lives in the apartments with his wife and infant son, said it’s a main reason he’s remained in the district.

Affordable educator housing has existed for decades, especially in remote school districts like Byers. But teachers are increasingly getting priced out of the communities they work in — causing them to seek employment elsewhere or avoid jobs in high-priced metro areas. To combat this issue, nonprofits and school districts across the nation — in states including Colorado, Arkansas, California, New Mexico and Kansas — are pursuing teacher housing projects to improve educator retention.

For example, rent for a one-bedroom apartment at a for San Francisco Unified staff starts at $1,183 per month, in a district where this year is $79,468 and similar rentals go for around $3,000 or more. First-year Kansas City educators who make a $48,150 can pay $600 to $900 a month to share a duplex with other teachers. Nearby monthly rents start at $1,000. San Francisco tenants are selected through a lottery system, but many other housing projects prioritize new teachers and have waiting lists.

Between 2019 and 2025, housing costs increased by roughly 50% on average, outpacing the average 24% growth in entry-level teacher salaries, according to a .

“Until all teachers can reliably afford basic necessities like housing, the challenges of attracting and retaining a diverse, high-quality teacher workforce will likely persist,” the report said.

‘I don’t have much turnover’

Phipps interviewed with multiple Colorado districts, including one that paid more than what Byers was offering. But he liked the high school social studies job in Byers the most because of the school community and low-cost housing. Rental units are scarce in the district, with monthly payments starting around $1,400 — a high price tag for Phipps’ $50,738 salary. Having a boss who was also his landlord wasn’t an issue, he said.

“The demand and prices of housing — especially rent — is very high out here,” he said. “I don’t know if I would have moved out to Colorado without this teacher housing. I didn’t know what was going to be do-able with my teacher salary straight out of college.”

The Byers school district has owned staff housing since the 1960s. It has 10 apartments and two houses — all occupied, with a waiting list. Superintendent Tom Trudell said the rent pays for occasional renovations or repairs. Housing has always been part of the district’s strategy to attract and retain teachers, he said, and it allows them to save money to eventually buy a house of their own.

“There’s a kind of a bond that builds between [me and my tenants], because if they’re quality employees, they’re typically not going anywhere,” he said. “So I don’t have much turnover.”

In the Vilas School District in southeastern Colorado, Superintendent Abby Pettinger is the landlord for 11 rental homes that house eight single school staff members and one family with children. Two units are vacant. The homes have become outdated because the district lacks money for repairs and remodels.

“It’s really hard to be somebody’s landlord and be their boss,” she said. “We wanted [the units] to be an asset for our staff, but I wish that we could be at a point that it could be self-sustaining. We’re not at that point.”

Some teacher housing complexes are owned and managed by local nonprofits rather than the school district. That’s the case for Harrison School District 2 in Colorado Springs. An organization called We Fortify is raising $6 million for that consist of 325-square-foot tiny homes. Rent will start at $825 per month. 

Construction has already begun, and teachers will begin to move in next summer, said district spokesperson Christine O’Brien. 

“We did poll all of our staff before we … started designing the idea for the village,” she said. “We could have filled five villages with just our initial interest.”

District plans don’t always come through

Of the 12 teacher housing developments in California, seven have popped up in just the last three years, according to a from the Center for Cities and School at the University of California-Berkeley.

“Generally, recruitment has become more and more challenging, so districts are motivated to look for other ways to enhance their ability to recruit staff,” said Sara Hinkley, the center’s program manager. “High costs of housing have become pretty entrenched. And then most states are experiencing declining enrollment, which means there are more properties available.”

The Santa Clara Unified School District was the first in the state to complete a teacher housing project, in 2002. This year, three developments for multiple school districts opened in Silicon Valley, in , and . Educators in Mountain View and Palo Alto were offered free rent as an incentive to move in.

Building affordable teacher housing can be a rocky process, especially if schools or nonprofits run into problems with city zoning laws, insufficient funding or a lack of community support. It to build modern, five-story apartment buildings for San Francisco Unified teachers because of housing density concerns and other issues. And once the lottery opened, some teacher applications .

In 2021, California’s Oakland Unified School District for future teacher housing. The apartments have yet to be built. The project hasn’t received enough funding, and union members have to focus first on raising wages.

“We’ve definitely seen districts realize that what they want to do isn’t going to be financially feasible,” Hinkley said. “They may get as far as choosing a parcel of land, coming up with an idea of what they want to build and [find out] that they are going to have to charge rent that’s way too high in order to make the project work.”

Rural schools in New Mexico have access to , but larger districts like Sante Fe Public Schools don’t qualify. In recent years, the in funding for a 40-unit housing complex project, but that was well below the needed $15 million. Now, Santa Fe is trying to fund it through a .

An initiative in Bentonville, Arkansas, stalled last year when a rezoning request to turn school district property into 40 cottages for low-income staff. The Bentonville School District had next to its high school to the Excellerate Foundation, a local nonprofit that was funding the $35 million housing project. 

Superintendent Debbie Jones said she thought it was the end of a project she had worked on since 2021, when Bentonville began to lose newly hired educators who couldn’t afford to live in the district. But then the foundation included the teacher housing plans in a that’s slated to open in 2026. Two-bedroom cottages will cost $1,000 a month.

“It’s actually better than our original plan because they have built in a 3,000-square-foot child care center that we will run and it serves the families in that neighborhood,” she said.

Giving new teachers a boost with education and a home

The housing projects for the Bentonville and Harrison school districts have guidelines to allow low-income young staffers like new teachers or paraprofessionals to qualify. Residents also have a time limit for staying in the housing. For Bentonville, educators have to move out after five years. In the Harrison district, the maximum is three years.

In both, residents are required to participate in financial management classes that are designed to help them prepare to move out. In Bentonville, staffers can pay an extra $500 a month in rent as part of a program that will give tenants $50,000 toward their next house.

Kelly Davis, president of the Bentonville Education Association, said young teachers in the district are getting excited for the development to open because monthly rent costs anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000.

“When I came to the district back in 2003, I couldn’t afford to live here. I still don’t live in Bentonville,” he said. “They are trying very hard to make sure that the lowest-paid people in the district have a place to live, so that they don’t have to leave the community.”

Kansas City has a similar housing project that not only provides financial education, but helps college graduates get their first teaching job.

In 2020, Trinity Davis left her post as assistant superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools and founded to increase the number of local Black educators. A by the University of Missouri-Kansas City reported the metro area had more than 53,000 Black students but fewer than 1,200 Black teachers.

Teachers Like Me recruits recent college graduates by securing them a job in one of eight partner Kansas City school districts while also providing low-cost housing. School districts pay the organization $15,000 for every educator they receive through the process. The nonprofit has three homes and is in the process of building seven more to create a duplex neighborhood. 

“Suburban districts that don’t have any teachers of color are coming to us to say, ‘Hey, can you help us recruit some Black teachers?’” Davis said. “I have an elementary school where the fourth-grade, fifth-grade and sixth-grade teachers are all Teachers Like Me [participants]. They’re like a family and they live together.”

Last week, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department announced that New Mexico will become the to offer universal child care to families as of Nov. 1.��

Over the past six years, New Mexico has become a trailblazer in child care infrastructure. In 2019, the state created its first Early Childhood Education and Care Department with a Cabinet-level secretary, showing a commitment to improving care and support for young children. In 2022, New Mexico became the first state to enshrine a right to early education for children 0 to 5 years old, by passing a constitutional amendment and directing dedicated funding to child care and early childhood education. The state pulled dollars from its Land, which collects and invests profits from oil and gas revenues, and created a steady stream of money for early childhood programs. This has led to increased pay for teachers, higher reimbursements for providers that accept subsidies, more families qualifying for free or reduced price child care, and more child care slots.

Since 2019, the state has made progress on improving access and affordability of child care, expanding free child care to families with an income at or below 400% of the federal poverty level, which for a family of four is an annual household income of $128,600. But without a sliding scale model, families with an income over that threshold were left responsible for covering the cost of care. Starting in November, all residents of New Mexico will be able access child care for free, regardless of income. 

In a touting the change, the state estimates that families will save an average of $12,000 per year. The state is also implementing an incentive rate for child care providers that commit to paying entry-level staff a minimum of $18 per hour and offer 10 hours of care per day, five days a week, with the goal of creating an additional 5,000 early childhood professionals to staff a universal system.

Here’s a look back at some of the key actions and policy changes that have led New Mexico to arrive at universal free child care.

2019

New Mexico creates the Early Childhood Education and Care Department

In 2019, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law Senate Bill 22, creating the New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department — an agency that would coordinate the work of three previous departments under a single entity to administer all state programs for children from prenatal to 5 years old. Though several states had Cabinets devoted to the interests of children, this move led New Mexico to become one of four with a department entirely dedicated to early childhood.

2021

Grassroots advocates in New Mexico target money from the state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund to pay for early childhood education

After a decade of organizing, early childhood education advocates in New Mexico home in on creating a change to their state constitution to guarantee a right to early education, eyeing the Land Grant Permanent Fund as a path toward developing a funding stream to support the vision.

2022

A Win for Early Childhood Education with a Ballot Initiative

On Nov. 8, 2022, New Mexico voters a constitutional amendment making their state the first to guarantee a right to early childhood education with funding to support it. 

Grassroots activists mobilized to bring a change in early childhood education to New Mexico, and after a ten year battle they found success through a constitutional amendment which received more than 70% of the vote. 

Hailey Heiz, deputy director of the University of New Mexico Cradle to Career Policy Institute, explores how New Mexico’s child care landscape has changed and what advocates across the country should keep their eyes on in this Q&A.

2024

After COVID disruptions, report shows New Mexico among states making top gains in pre-K enrollment

Two years after voters in New Mexico demanded more access to early childhood education by , the state’s investment has begun to show success. According to the From the National Institute for Early Education Research, it’s one of the top states to make gains in preschool enrollment, with 70% of 4-year-olds now attending public preschool, making the state one of just a handful that serves at least two-thirds of eligible students.

2025

A glimpse into New Mexico’s progress over the years

New Mexico’s early care and education system has undergone dramatic changes over the past five years as a result of a significant investment the state made in 2019. Increased wages for early educators, higher reimbursement rates for providers who accept subsidies, increased capacity and an increase in the number of families eligible for free or reduced price child care are among the advancements

There are tribes living on in New Mexico, a state where Native American citizens represent about of the population. Half of the Head Start and Early Head Start programs in New Mexico are on tribal lands. 

In addition to investing in early care and education by expanding funding, creating a dedicated department for early childhood and becoming the first state to guarantee a right to early childhood education, New Mexico has also explored ways to support its tribal communities. This includes supporting programs that preserve tribal languages and culture. 

With federal funds from the American Rescue Plan gone, some states have established trust funds dedicated to early care and education — and some say they’ve drawn inspiration from New Mexico, which was ahead of the curve. From voters approving the ballot measure to devote funding to early care and education in 2022, to efforts to decrease costs for families and increase pay for providers, and more recently, doubling the minimum amount the fund will spend on early education each year — the state has been a leader.

New Mexico becomes the first state to offer universal child care

On Monday, Sept. 8, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department that New Mexico will become the first state in the nation to guarantee no-cost universal child care to families starting on Nov. 1, making child care free for families, regardless of income. 

New Mexico will offer child care at no cost to all residents, regardless of incomes, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham , thus becoming the first U.S. state to offer universal free child care, she said.

The state Early Childhood Education and Care Department will begin writing rules to entirely remove the income eligibility threshold for a family to receive child care assistance by Nov. 1. The state currently parent copays on child care for families whose income is up to 400% of the federal poverty level.

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“Child care is essential to family stability, workforce participation, and New Mexico’s future prosperity,” the governor said in a statement issued following a news conference. “By investing in universal child care, we are giving families financial relief, supporting our economy, and ensuring that every child has the opportunity to grow and thrive.”

The free child care will save families on average $12,000 annually, the governor’s office said.

During Monday’s news conference, Lujan Grisham said reaching the milestone of free universal child care required asking the Legislature and New Mexico voters for sustainable sources of funding. New Mexico voters in 2022 a Constitutional Amendment that pushed state lawmakers to tap into a state fund and use it to build out the early childhood education system in the state.

“That was always the vision,” she said. “It took us this long to realize it, but by golly, we did.”

Along with the expanded access to free child care, the state in one week will allow entities like local governments and schools to start applying for low-interest loans to expand or create new child care facilities, under rules to the state’s Child Care Facility Loan Fund passed in the most recent legislative session, Early Childhood Education and Care Department Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky said.

Between 12,000 and 13,000 new child care slots could open up, with a goal of 55 new licensed child care centers, 120 new licensed homes and 1,000 new registered homes, she noted.

“We see the interest, we’re also talking to industry leaders who are very interested in this, and also school superintendents,” Groginsky said. “I think it’s an all-in strategy from industry, business leaders, our schools and our community-based providers.”

Lujan Grisham said universal child care is “the backbone of creating a system of support for families” that allow parents to go to work or college.

“It’s going to make New Mexico extremely attractive to build your business here,” Lujan Grisham said. “It’s going to make New Mexico extremely attractive to come here and raise your family.”

The new rule will also address pay for child care providers, the governor said. According to a handout at Monday’s news conference, under the proposed rule, providers will earn additional funding if they pay all entry-level workers at least $18 to $21 per hour and remain open at least 10 hours per day, five days per week.

Monday’s announcement builds on six years of progress in the state, said Dr. Neal Halfon, founding director of the . He said New Mexico is the first U.S. state to put in place a blueprint for “an ecosystem of early childhood supports,” including a first-of-its-kind statewide comprehensive, actionable data program.

“This portfolio of strategies — I’m telling you as an outsider — is a really big deal,” Halfson said. “As a developmental scientist, we’d like to see every place have this kind of scaffolding in place. This is a national model.”

In the most recent legislative session, lawmakers increased the department’s budget by $113 million to $995 million total, including $463 million specifically for child care, Groginsky said. The state in 2020 also created a new pot of money called the Early Childhood Trust Fund, which started at $320 million and now has $10 billion, Lt. Gov. Howie Morales said during the news conference.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Goldberg for questions: info@sourcenm.com.

Located in an engineering-themed magnet school near the Rio Grande, Coffey’s workrooms are packed to the literal rafters with pieces of metal displaying good welds and bad, crude joinery and more sophisticated bezels and, on a ledge ringing the front room, boxes that students make to prove they know how to use the spark-spitting tools — safely.

Those boxes represent a concrete step toward real careers. In an arrangement unusual for a U.S. high school, Valley’s partnerships with local trade unions give students a head start on apprenticeships — the years-long paid training paths that are the first building block of a solid career. 

Last year, leaders of Sheet Metal Workers Local 49 had paid Coffey’s shop a visit. The clock immediately caught their attention: The two years of “shop hours” documented on the students’ time cards would entitle some of them to leapfrog the lowest rung on the welding career ladder. 

High schoolers aren’t yet eligible to call themselves apprentices, something that changes the day after graduation. But thanks to the time clock, Coffey’s graduates not only got to wear a sash proclaiming their new trade union home over their graduation gowns; on the strength of the hours and training recorded on their cards, many received 18 months of credit toward completing a four-year apprenticeship and, for some, a starting wage of $24 an hour, rather than the usual $18.50 entry-level pay.

The $15 an hour Albuquerque Public Schools pays Valley’s student-interns to tackle projects throughout the district also counted as work experience in the union’s eye, adding several dollars an hour more.

Welding is one of six career preparation pathways that make up Valley’s magnet program, Engineering the Future. The others are architecture, computer science, carpentry, JROTC and engineering. Last spring, three graduates went directly into carpentry apprenticeships. 

Nationally, the number of partnerships between trade unions and schools is — particularly in states where officials push for better career and technical education. But if students get any credit for their high school experience, it’s usually deemed a pre-apprenticeship. An estimated 5% or fewer get paid internships.

For people looking to enter the trades, though, apprenticeships are the gold standard. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, in 2024 just 10,000 of the of the more than 13 million students ages 16 to 18 began apprenticeships nationally, including 18-year-olds who started after graduating high school. Average starting pay for those who complete any four-year apprenticeship training track is . 

Valley’s Engineering the Future program predates the current college- and career-readiness push. It launched in the 2018-19 academic year as a magnet school, enrolling students from anywhere in the district. More than a fourth of Valley students overall are learning English, while an eye-popping 36% receive special education services. 

Students who spend at least three years in one of the training programs, participate in an outside STEM competition or school showcase and complete a self-reflection earn an Engineering the Future “distinction stole” — a sash embroidered with emblems signifying their accomplishments, and in some instances their new trade — to wear at graduation.

Altogether, 436 of Valley’s 949 students participate in a career pathway, with some enrolled in more than one program. In 2025, 45 seniors earned Engineering the Future stoles, which were bestowed several days before graduation at a separate ceremony celebrating students’ new jobs and union affiliations. 

As chocolate-meets-peanut butter moments go, Coffey’s decision to put up a punch clock was spectacularly well timed. New Mexico has long lagged in students’ academic and post-secondary outcomes, ranking for nine consecutive years in the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count Data Book report. 

In 2018, a district court found the state violated students’ , as guaranteed in New Mexico’s constitution. Among other shortcomings, the judge overseeing the case said, students have a right to be college- and career-ready, and she ordered state education officials to ensure that historically underserved children are set up for success after high school. 

State officials and attorneys for the families who brought the lawsuit were still going back and forth when COVID-19 forced schools to close for in-person classes. Attendance rates have traditionally lagged in New Mexico, but coming out of the pandemic they were in free fall.

Between 2019 and 2023, the number of students missing 10% or more of school days shot up 119% — the largest increase in the country — to 40%. In the 2021-22 school year, 43% of Albuquerque Public Schools students were chronically absent. 

In January 2022, the district released to address basic academic outcomes, student habits and mindsets, and college- and career-readiness. One goal is to increase the percentage of high school graduates who earn a bilingual diploma, credit in college prep courses or an industry certification from 40% in 2023 to 50% in 2028.

A year ago, a member of the team that created the plan, Gabriella Duran Blakey, was tapped to lead the district. In a speech outlining her agenda, Blakey lauded Coffey for propelling graduates into careers. 

When school starts Aug. 7, two high schools will launch “freshman academies” — year-long programs where ninth graders are introduced to different career pathways in nine-week cycles. The goal is for every student to choose a career-focused academy during sophomore year. Eventually, district leaders want each of the system’s 13 comprehensive high schools to have a college or career focus. 

It’s a huge undertaking, according to Mia Howard, a leader of the New Schools Venture Fund’s innovative public schools team. The district will need to ensure that the new programs align with the community’s priorities and regional workforce needs, for starters.

Also crucial: Seeing partnerships like those Coffey created as part of the infrastructure needed to sustain the program over time, Howard says. In addition to creating the kind of seamless pathways Valley’s students enjoy, having community partners makes teachers’ jobs more sustainable.  

In short, school system leaders will have to figure out how to do what Coffey did — banging on employers’ and union locals’ doors to ask about opportunities — in a more systematic way. 

Here, too, the welding teacher may have paved the way. In addition to Local 49, he forged partnerships with carpenters unions, the UA Local 412 Plumbers and Pipefitters and several of the businesses that employ the unions’ members. These arrangements piqued the interest of the state Department of Workforce Solutions, which Coffey says is contemplating creating summer pre-apprenticeships.

Getting a leg up on entering the workforce or pursuing a degree is one goal. But Albuquerque leaders say they believe students will find the model more engaging, be more likely to show up for school consistently and ultimately get better academic outcomes. 

Kids who find the engineering program are often square pegs, says Cassandra Gonzales, the assistant principal who oversees the career track. Some want to continue STEM studies they started in elementary or middle school. Others have struggled academically or floundered at large, traditional high schools.

May graduate Signe Conley is now on a fast track to medical school. But when she showed up in Coffey’s classroom in ninth grade, her highest ambition was to make herself invisible. 

“I didn’t want to talk to anybody,” she says. “I was scared of everything.” 

Her mother signed her up for welding but then emailed the teacher and asked him not to call on Conley or make her do anything, lest the girl have panic attacks. Coffey received the email as a gantlet dropped.

He handed Conley a stick welder, a tool that is both basic and finicky. He showed her how to make the electrical arc that generates enough heat to join two pieces of metal in a precise weld. 

“It was loud, overwhelming,” says Conley. “Sparks were flying.”

The girl’s family tends 1,600 head of cattle, so Conley got plenty of practice fixing cattle guards and gates and other things on their ranch. The ability to control molten metal changed her.  

She stayed in Coffey’s class but enrolled in a dual college program in nursing at another Albuquerque high school. In the fall, she will use the credits she earned to jump-start the process of earning a bachelor’s in nursing at the University of New Mexico, which will in turn give her preferential enrollment at the university’s medical school. 

Junior Tobias Romero has also stayed in Coffey’s program even though he’s not pursuing an apprenticeship. He likes making metal art, and he is happy he has welding as a backup possibility for earning money. But his plan is to get a Ph.D. and work in New Mexico’s aerospace engineering industry. He’s gunning for an internship at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility. 

Coffey is perhaps proudest that Dominic Duran was among the new apprentices receiving a stole last spring. Two years ago, then-sophomore Duran announced he was dropping out and would enroll in a commercial welding training program. 

“I said, ‘Dominic, why would you pay $40,000 to get a certificate?’ ” Coffey recalls. “ ‘I can help you get it for free.’ ” 

A high school dropout himself, Coffey taught himself metallurgy. He bought a cheap welding tool at a hardware store and made a gate to keep his chocolate lab, Chuy, from escaping. Then he started turning random metal objects into art to give to friends. Soon, he was producing prototypes to be sold as décor in big-box stores. 

After a health crisis ended that career, Coffey decided to become a teacher. As the boss of an in-school metal fabrication shop, he is both tough and committed to creating a second home for kids. He’s known for bringing homemade red chile stew to share for lunch — and for encouraging his budding metalworkers to apply their talents not just to industrial settings, but to making art. 

As freshmen and sophomores, students have to meet his high standards if they want to be considered for a district-paid internship. Watching their junior- and senior-year classmates cash paychecks is a big motivator.

“I put the apprenticeship bug in kids’ ears their junior year, so by the time they are seniors they know whether they want to do it,” he says. “I just sit back and watch until then.” 

In a bittersweet twist of recognition, last year was Coffey’s last at Valley. The unions he has built relationships with are so pleased that Local 49 offered him a job setting up partnerships with schools throughout the state. 

Can Valley’s brave experiment survive the loss of its senior foreman, the guy who built its student welders’ reputation one cold call to a local at a time? Coffey, the person who goes in search of ways to ignite kids’ passions, is determined to see that it will.

One of New Mexico’s representatives in Congress says the Trump administration’s refusal to release education funding is harming both children and adult students, especially those who are falling behind in reading and mathematics.

All three of New Mexico’s representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives on July 10 joined approximately 145 other federal lawmakers in a asking the Trump administration to immediately lift a freeze on $7 billion meant for student learning and achievement; after-school programs; teacher training; and adult education and literacy.

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“There is no legitimate reason why any review of these programs should prevent the Administration from fulfilling its responsibility to the American people on time,” they wrote. “No more excuses — follow the law and release the funding meant for our schools, teachers and families.”

Vasquez told Source NM the administration is withholding $44 million from K-12 schools and adult education programs in New Mexico.

That includes $21.6 million in his congressional district; $12 million for Albuquerque Public Schools; and approximately $3 million Las Cruces Public Schools, he said.

“I was an English learner in the public schools system in this country, and I got to where I was because these programs existed,” Vasquez said in an interview. “We are selling our kids short by eliminating these programs, and most importantly all of those kids who are falling behind in math and reading.”

He said school administrators are digging into their budget reserves in an attempt to find solutions. Withholding the money could result in dropped programs, hiring freezes and the loss of essential student supports, Stateline .

“What I got from the Las Cruces superintendent was, if they want to continue these programs, which are extremely valuable to the community, to the families and students alike, that they’re going to essentially have to figure out where to make cuts elsewhere within the total budget,” Vasquez said in an interview. “So they’re in a rough place right now.”

Melanie Blea, executive director of federal and state programs at Albuquerque Public Schools,�� told Source that while district leaders have been planning various scenarios for funding cuts, the timing of the administration’s funding freeze is a challenge given school starts in one month. The district started planning its budget in December; received approval from their school board in March and April; and received approval from the state in June, she said.

“We’re doing everything possible to make sure that schools are safe from these cuts, that they don’t necessarily feel them,” Blea said. “We’re trying to fill holes. We’re trying to cover as much as we possibly can with other funds.”

The funding freeze affects continuing education for teachers at all 143 APS schools, Blea said, and ancillary staff like nurses and counselors.

“We probably can’t do this for much longer, as far as insulating schools,” she added.

Martin Salazar, communications director for APS, told Source NM that the district is committed to keeping all of its 55 staff who are paid out of the frozen funds employed for the rest of the school year.

“If this goes on, and it’s the same situation next school year or the following school year, that’s going to pose a problem for us,” he said.

A voicemail for a spokesperson at Las Cruces Public Schools was not returned as of Monday morning.

The Trump administration state governments it would hold back the funds on June 30, to ensure that public money is “spent in accordance with the President’s priorities and the Department’s statutory responsibilities.”

The lawmakers’ letter is addressed to U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought

New Mexico and 15 other states this month McMahon’s agency over its decision in April to also freeze $1 billion in grant funding, including school-based mental health programs.

A spokesperson for Vought’s office the Rhode Island Current that federal school funds were withheld after officials found some districts across the country had allegedly misused the money “to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda,” including English language instruction for immigrant students, scholarships for undocumented students and a seminar about “queer resistance in the arts.”

Vasquez told Source that Trump and other Republicans have been saying their goal in withholding the funding has been to “end free education to undocumented children,” which Vasquez called xenophobic and “a blatant lie” after reviewing the Las Cruces Public Schools budget with Superintendent Ignacio Ruiz.

“These funding cuts are going to have impacts that will be felt by everybody, by all the students,” Vasquez said. “Squeezing every dollar from programs that benefit the public good to pay for these tax cuts for the rich is the real reason this administration is doing this.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Goldberg for questions: info@sourcenm.com.

When finished, they rub the remaining cornmeal dust over their hands and heart. “It gives them strength,” Gachupin said. Cornmeal is sacred to the Jemez, a federally recognized tribe, she explains. Each classroom has a cast-iron grinder attached to a desk with baskets of corn next to it. “Whenever it’s getting low, without even telling them, [the children] will go to the machine and start grinding it,” she said. 

The morning prayer and grinding of cornmeal are two of the many traditions 3- to 5-year olds learn at Walatowa’s Head Start, where Gachupin has taught for over 25 years. The entire program is conducted in Hemish (which as Hemish-Towa, or Towa), the oral language of the , as part of an effort to preserve the community’s language, history and culture.

Native American citizens represent about of the population in New Mexico, and tribes live on , like the Jemez Pueblo. Of the Head Start and Early Head Start programs in New Mexico, half are on tribal lands; is one of three that implements a formal language immersion program (the other two are Saad K’idilyé Language Nest in Albuquerque and Keres Children’s Learning Center at Cochiti Pueblo). 

Over the past five years, New Mexico has made significant investments in early care and education, including expanding its funding, creating an in the state government and most notably, becoming the first state to guarantee a right to early childhood education. The state is also supporting programs that protect and preserve tribal languages and culture, including the New Mexico Indigenous Languages initiative, Native Language Database and Grow Your Own Indigenous Language Teacher Pipeline. Some of the state’s Head Start programs are also prioritizing preserving tribal culture in their work with young children and families.

Head Start is a free, federally funded child care program designed to serve children from low-income families by providing high-quality care so parents can work and offering early learning opportunities that get young children ready for school. The Trump Administration indicated it would , before in May. But for tribal communities like Jemez, Head Start provides more than just child care and school readiness, it creates a lifeline to their cultural identity, which . 

“The reality of language loss has really scared us,” said Lana Garcia, the executive director of the Walatowa Head Start, who grew up speaking the Hemish language with her mother and grandmother at home. While Garcia spoke Hemish at home, she attended English-speaking schools, learned to read in English and was an English major in college before becoming a teacher in a local public school near Albuquerque. She moved back to Jemez in 2007 to lead the Walatowa program. Garcia recalls her own daughter asking her why she’d never been taught the language. “It was painful,” she said, adding that for so long, she’d assumed English had been the better language to learn.

Facilitating the language immersion program at the Walatowa Head Start has clarified for Garcia that young children can keep alive through the history and customs of their tribe. The curriculum is filled with activities specific to Jemez culture: customary songs and dances, story hour led by local elders, and traditional meals like atole, a blue corn drink served hot, Jemez enchiladas and frybread. The staff speak Hemish to one another and to the children. When Garcia answers a call in her office, she does so in Hemish, before switching to English if and when the caller requires it. 

It’s not uncommon among tribes for a language to be oral-only, like Hemish. Garcia explained that Hemish is considered sacred, and they do not have permission from tribal leaders to write it. “Our language is really tied to our ceremonies,” she explained. 

Because Head Start is federally funded, decisions about its future are made in Washington, not in . While federal funding covers 80% of the cost of each Head Start program, the local community is , and according to Garcia, she must plan carefully because operating a Head Start program on tribal land comes with additional costs. A bus driver is needed to transport the children to and from school, and the routes’ unpaved roads can lead to more repairs, which she must budget for. An enrollment decline has also created challenges. Before COVID, Walatowa served 70 children, and now it serves 57, meaning less federal money flowing to the program. 

Even though New Mexico has allocated significant funding for child care, there are no additional funds for Walatowa to operate should Head Start face federal cuts. The tribal government has no spare money — there is no back up plan to stay afloat. According to Garcia, the funding uncertainty has caused panic in her community. Before the administration pivoted from its plan to eliminate funding, Garcia said: “The fact that Trump , that is alarming for a lot of us.” 

But what Garcia does have is a strong success record of keeping the Hemish language and culture alive. Some of the skills the children receive from watching and taking part in Hemish ceremonies — such as having a longer, focused attention span — will help them throughout their education. 

“When we watch our dances, it is all day,” said Garcia. “You’re expected to sit and watch. Those expectations are given to us by the War Captains that you stay for the whole day. You stay until the very end.”

As children have grown and graduated from Head Start, many have kept a strong connection to the Hemish culture and language. With pride, Garcia recalled seeing several boys who graduated the program take a prominent singing role during a tribal ceremony, and witnessing a child who insisted on going to the ceremony celebration on his own, even though his parents didn’t participate. 

“Success is students who know who they are and where they come from and know how they can contribute to their community — that is the Jemez way of life,” she said.

This work is supported by a at the Better Life Lab. More details on the reporting grants can .

Parra has been teaching at Christina Kent, a child care center that dates back to 1919, for 23 years. Though she works full time, she described when she lived “paycheck to paycheck” as a single mom raising three kids and added that she occasionally had to borrow $20 from a friend, just to get gas. 

But the early care and education system in New Mexico has undergone dramatic changes in the past five years, with an influx of investment from the state that has upended the sector’s traditional business model which, in most of the country, relies on thin margins and . In 2020, after a sustained effort from local activists, was signed into law, creating a for early childhood education, and a designated early childhood department in the state government. 

Then, in 2022, New Mexico became the first state to enshrine a right to early education for children ages 0 to 5 years old, by passing a constitutional amendment that expanded funding from the so that a steady stream of money would be dedicated to early childhood year after year. Among the shifts since 2022: increased pay for teachers, higher reimbursements for providers that accept subsidies, more families qualifying for free or reduced price child care, and more child care slots.

Christina Kent Early Childhood Center, for example, has made significant changes including increasing wages and providing health insurance for staff, said Sondra Carpenter, the center’s executive director. Before COVID, Parra made $17 an hour; today she makes more than $22 an hour. With the additional income, she’s paid off her car, purchased her first home, and reports that she no longer feels the unending stress that comes with financial precarity. The center is also in the process of expanding to serve more families: it’s broken ground on a new facility for infants and toddlers, which Carpenter said will open this September. 

Across the state, child care providers who accept subsidies have seen their reimbursement rates rise, and the subsidies are now tax-exempt, saving families and providers more money. With the increased investment, more families now qualify for child care subsidies, including those who make up to , which for a family of four is an annual household income of $128,600.

Liliana Vazquez Diaz, another child care provider, has also reaped the benefits of these shifts. She now sees higher reimbursement rates for the six kids enrolled in La Casa de Lily, the child care program she runs out of her house in the Alamosa neighborhood of Albuquerque. Diaz was recently approved to provide pre-K services, which will raise her reimbursement rate even more. 

And the Explora Science Center and Children’s Museum in Albuquerque, which runs two classrooms out of their museum space for children of students at the local community college, has just broken ground on a new child care facility, which will serve over 100 children, with 16 slots for infants, which are the toughest slots secure in the state. “The state child care subsidies have made that a viable option,” said Kristin Leigh, co-executive director of Explora.  

“We have really made a shift in the way we approach early education,” said Javier Martinez, the speaker of the New Mexico House of Representatives, who ran for the legislature on a platform of early education and immigration rights. “We are rebuilding the village that it takes to raise a child in New Mexico.” 

How New Mexico Funded Early Education

New Mexico has consistently been for school attendance, economic well-being, child poverty, education proficiency, and . “There is this shame of having more children in poverty than anywhere else,” said Hailey Heinz, deputy director and senior research scientist at the Cradle to Career Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico. The includes New Mexico’s which live on but have faced centuries of adverse policies and discrimination. “We have people who have never had a generation that was allowed to thrive,” said Heinz. 

An understanding of New Mexico’s complicated history of child well-being and poverty can be traced back to the , when the state ceded to the United States. For more than 60 years, New Mexico was a territory and its people didn’t have full rights as U.S. citizens, but the region’s oil and gas reserves were profitable. When in 1912, New Mexico became a state, a Land Grant Permanent Fund was created, whereby profits from oil and gas would be bound up in the trust, and the proceeds would pay for education and services for its citizens. 

“A giant trust fund to secure mineral rights, in which the state constitution determined the beneficiaries,” was how Jacob Vigil, the chief legislative officer for New Mexico Voices for Children described it. “New Mexico is called ‘such a poor state’ but it is not a poor state, it’s a colonized state with historical disinvestment and racism,” he said. 

As oil and gas prices continued to boom, the Land Grant Permanent Fund swelled into the billions. Today, it’s worth . Yet the state still had high rates of poverty, and more research began to show the profound effects of improving generational poverty outcomes through early education and intervention. So in 2009, grassroots activists, including Martinez and Vigil, . 

This required legislative action, and the chairman of the Senate budget committee, Democrat John Arthur Smith, denied the opportunity for a committee vote for nearly a decade. But political pressure and grassroots organizing led to a Democratic primary challenge, which Smith lost in July 2020. After that the bill easily passed both the House and Senate, and since it required a constitutional change, it was put to a public vote, which it passed in the November 2022 election by an overwhelming 70%. 

Other states may not have the robust external funding source to use for early childhood, but Erica Gallegos, co-director of Child Care for Every Family Network believes New Mexico’s advocacy efforts are replicable elsewhere, especially when combined with political might. “You have to have a C4 strategy,” she said, referring to the organizations have when becoming involved in elections, and the willingness of advocacy groups to unseat legislators. “It can’t just be about going after Republicans. It has to be about going after power and holding that power accountable.”

What Success Looks Like

The dollars from the Land Grant Permanent Fund have allowed for substantial investment in early childhood. In addition to higher wages, increased subsidy reimbursement rates and expanded access to affordable child care for families, the state created an agency dedicated to early childhood with a cabinet-level secretary, and added considerable funding for universal , early intervention and pre-K programs. The state also created a higher earned income tax credit and child tax credit that are both fully refundable. 

Martinez says he is “very satisfied” with the state’s progress in early care and education to date. He predicts that in the next few years, New Mexico will start to see improved reading and math scores, as the children benefiting from early learning programs matriculate to elementary school. He cites studies, including a , that show dramatic improvements in the lives of kids and families who participated in the home visiting program,including increased parent confidence, and and interactions with law enforcement.

But he’s also identified additional areas to target: strengthening the care infrastructure for 0 to 3-year-olds, creating a state paid family and medical leave option, and improving the foster care system, which has kids . 

He is also anticipating interest from private equity groups looking to be involved in child care in the state, and he’s keeping a close eye on that, as such groups tend to be intrigued by sectors with steady government funding, yet in implementing them.

Martinez knows that the conversations around early care and education have changed. When he was building support for opening up the Land Grant Permanent Fund, he spoke about child care as “the need to invest in kids, how those years were so critical,” he explained. But now, he says he can speak more openly about what this was about. “We are literally talking about a redistribution of wealth,” he said. 

As the value of the Land Grant Permanent Fund ballooned, Martinez said, financial advisors and wealth managers investing those funds were making millions each year in fees for doing so. Yet, children in New Mexico were “dying on the vine,” he added. 

Opening up the Land Grant Permanent Fund became a rallying cry. “It wasn’t just about more money in the [early childhood] system,” he said. “It was about the poorest and most vulnerable children being able to make use of it.” 

This work is supported by a at the Better Life Lab. More details on the reporting grants can .

The parties in the over educational equity in New Mexico will meet in court next week to discuss a motion alleging the state has not complied with previous court orders, along with the plaintiffs’ request for a “remedial plan.”

The case, originally filed in 2014, led to a finding in 2018 by the late First Judicial District Court Judge Sarah Singleton, who found that the state was not providing equitable educational opportunities to Native students, English language learners, low-income students and students with disabilities. She ordered the state to take steps to address the needs of these at-risk students and ensure schools have the resources to provide them with the education they deserve.

Attorneys representing Louise Martinez and Wilhelmina Yazzie filed a joint motion of non-compliance in September 2024, arguing that the state has not made significant progress in addressing the needs of at-risk students. Specifically, in their motion, plaintiffs point to ongoing poor student performance; high turnover within the New Mexico Public Education Department; high teacher vacancy rates; and a lack of targeted funding for at-risk students.

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Since Singleton’s decision, the state has increased funding for public education, but students are still being overlooked, Melissa Candelaria, education director for the NM Center on Law and Poverty, which represents the plaintiffs, told Source NM.

The motion hearing is scheduled for 9 a.m. Tuesday, April 29.

“We believe the court’s ruling should have been a wakeup call,” Candelaria said. “Our students can’t afford more bureaucratic churn and empty promises from PED. And we believe, the plaintiffs believe, the court must step in to enforce a real community-driven plan that reflects the urgency and the gravity to improve the overall state education system.”

Candelaria noted that the joint motion was not opposed by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who represents the state in the case. Court documents state that Torrez “agrees” that there has been “insufficient compliance.” However, private counsel for the PED did oppose the motion, particularly the plaintiff’s proposed remedial plan.

PED had not responded to a request from Source NM for comment prior to publication.

That plan, as detailed in court documents, includes nine components or goals, including: establishing a multicultural and multilingual educational framework; building an education workforce; increasing access to technology; developing methods of accountability; and strengthening the capacity of the PED.

“There’s no longer a debate that a statewide education plan is necessary. Now, the decision is who leads that development,” Candelaria said.

Candelaria also told Source the plaintiffs propose the Legislative Education Study Committee take the lead in developing the remedial plan because the department’s staff have knowledge and expertise in the area of education and have access to data. The department also has a director and permanent staff, as opposed to the PED, which has had multiple cabinet secretaries lead the department in the nearly seven years since Singleton’s decision, she noted.

“Without a plan, the efforts by the Legislature will still be piecemeal and scattershot and it’s not going to result in what we want to see in a transformed education system that’s equitable and that builds on the strengths and provides for the needs of the four student groups in the case,” Candelaria said.

The PED opposes the motion on this point, according to court documents, and argues the education department should take the lead in developing the plan. The department also says more time is needed to create and then implement the plan. Plaintiffs suggest that the five-year plan should be developed within six months of this month’s hearing.

Wilhelmina Yazzie, one of the original plaintiffs, told Source she feels “very optimistic” ahead of the motion hearing and that she hopes the judge agrees a plan is necessary. She added that the inequities in public education were emphasized during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Especially our tribal communities who are really deeply impacted by that, and they still continue to suffer to the present time right now and just by the state not taking the action that we need them to take,” Yazzie said.

Yazzie’s son, Xavier Nez, 22, was in third grade when the lawsuit started. He is now in his third year studying at the University of New Mexico. Candelaria pointed out that since the 2018 court decision, multiple classes of students have made their way through the state’s educational system and failed to receive a comprehensive education. Yazzie’s youngest child, Kimimila Black Moon, is currently in third grade but attends private school.

“She’s not in the public school because I still haven’t seen changes,” she said.

Yazzie told Source that another goal of hers is to get out into communities throughout the state and speak with families because many parents are still unaware of the lawsuit and “they’re the ones that firsthand know what their children need, what they’re lacking, how they’re doing in school.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Goldberg for questions: info@sourcenm.com.

At the same time, schools are struggling to bring down high absenteeism rates that undermine academic achievement and school climate. While there’s been some progress since the pandemic, far more students are missing a month or more of school than in 2019. The rates are particularly high among homeless students: of them were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year, compared with about 28% of all students and 36% of those who are economically disadvantaged.

These results are hardly surprising: The constant moves that come with homelessness often leave children far from their schools and without an easy way to get there. Hunger, lack of clean clothes and mental or physical illnesses complicate the picture. 

Our organizations, SchoolHouse Connection and Attendance Works, spent the past six months interviewing school leaders across the country to learn how districts are bringing students without stable housing back to school. reflect common-sense approaches driven by data and cloaked in compassion.

The first step is to identify the students who need help. The federal provides school districts with money for transportation, staffing and other assistance to students residing in shelters, cars and motels, as well as those staying temporarily with other people. But many families and youth don’t realize they qualify for extra help from the school district, and others are afraid or embarrassed to say they are homeless.

School districts are adjusting their to reflect different sorts of temporary living arrangements. And they’re training all school staff, from attendance clerks to counselors to administrators, to recognize the signs of homelessness. Even tardiness or poor attendance can be a tipoff that families have lost their homes.

Some districts are going further. In Henrico County, Virginia, the McKinney-Vento team hosts summer events at Richmond-area motels where homeless families live and signs students up for services. In Albuquerque, team members visit homeless shelters and RV parks.

Once students are identified, districts need to track what’s happening with their attendance and update the data regularly. Many districts are using that focus on addressing the factors that keep students from showing up, such as transportation, hunger and depression. 

In California’s Coalinga-Huron Unified School District, for instance, officials at each school once a week with a list of homeless students and review academics, attendance and other indicators. They emerge with action items for helping students, whether it’s rearranging a school bus route, bringing in a counselor or connecting the family to food and other services. Coalinga-Huron’s efforts are supported by real-time data analysis from the Fresno County Office of Education. 

In the small rural district and elsewhere, transportation remains one of the biggest barriers to school attendance for homeless students. Recognizing this, the McKinney-Vento Act requires districts to provide eligible students with a way to get to their “school of origin” if it is in their best interest. This often creates logistical challenges. 

For students living beyond school bus lines, some districts use vans or car services with drivers vetted for safety. But the costs can be high, and drivers are sometimes in short supply. Others offer gas cards to parents or student drivers. The Oxford Hills School District in Maine paid for one student’s driver’s education course.

The challenges go beyond expenses. Henrico County created school bus stops for homeless children living at motels but found the kids were embarrassed for their classmates to see where they lived. The district then changed the routes so the motels were the first stop of the day and the final stop in the afternoon. 

Depression and anxiety can also contribute to absenteeism. Near Denver, Adams 12 Five Star School District matches youth experiencing homelessness with mentors for a 15-hour independent study focused on academic goals, social-emotional development and postsecondary options. Kansas City, Kansas, uses a “2 x 10” approach, with a staff member spending two minutes talking to each at-risk student for 10 consecutive days.

It’s also key to reach families, many of whom report feeling unwelcome at school or embarrassed by their living situations. Fresno Unified School District in California hosts parent advisories to discuss challenges that are keeping homeless students from attending school. Adams 12 hired a diverse team of specialists whose backgrounds include some of the experiences that their students are living through, including poverty, immigration and homelessness. Henrico County spent some of its federal COVID relief funding for two years of Spanish lessons that help the McKinney-Vento team members communicate with families more easily.

This work takes coordination across departments, so that district staffers who concentrate on homeless students work closely with those monitoring school attendance. It also requires strong relationships with community-based organizations.

Several districts use a approach that coordinates nonprofits and government agencies in supporting students and families. In Coalinga-Huron, where families often have trouble accessing social services located more than an hour away in the county seat of Fresno, the district offers nonprofit organizations space to provide immigration services and language instruction, as well as a food pantry, clothing closet and health clinic.

Several states have also launched grant programs or provide funding specifically for students experiencing homelessness. In Washington state, a funds North Thurston Public School’s student navigator program that connects each homeless student with a staff member. Adams 12 relies in part on Colorado’s to pay the salaries for some of the specialists on its team. 

These districts are using data-driven approaches to improve attendance for homeless students. And they’re doing it with compassion and heart. They recognize that these absences mean weaker academic performance and higher dropout rates. In some places, the absences affect school funding, leaving less money available.

As the homelessness rate continues to rise, districts should adopt these common-sense approaches to identifying students, tracking data and addressing barriers with community, state and federal support.

SchoolHouse Connection and Attendance Works are hosting to explore the findings at 1 p.m. Eastern March 13 and 18. A SchoolHouse Connection-University of Michigan database provides for homeless students at the district, county and state levels.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Joyce Foundation and Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to Attendance Works and The 74.

I am also the parent of four children who attend Albuquerque schools and a former fourth-grade teacher.

So, when I heard that school boards focused on students’ academic and outcome data, I was shocked. 

The reality is that school boards spend too much time naming buildings and debating sports schedules or determining which paper towels to buy.

School boards play a vital role in empowering local governance and harnessing the power of democracy to address challenges closest to home. So in 2021, I decided to channel my shock at how little attention my hometown school board paid to academic outcomes and ran for a seat. 

I knocked on 8,000 doors, and today, I’m president of the Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education. We now spend significant time on matters related to student outcomes at our meetings. During one recent session, we looked at state assessment data and focused on unconscionably low achievement rates among Native American students. The conversation shined a light on the problem, and the district superintendent committed to doing things differently, starting with sharing this data with tribal leaders. 

Shifting conversations, and the way the board works, hasn’t been easy. Political distractions and ingrained practices like trying to manage schools instead of letting superintendents do their job get in the way.

But focusing on student outcome data has never been more important, as the recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress results show. The data is troubling.

Students are still experiencing declines in reading. Scores on the NAEP —  also known as the Nation’s Report Card — are down nationwide in both fourth and eighth grades, and that compounds declines seen on the 2022 report card. In math, scores increased in fourth grade, an area of resilience, but they’re flat in eighth grade after crashing historically the last time the test was given. 

NAEP is the only common assessment that allows policymakers and education leaders to compare student achievement across states and more than two dozen urban districts. Albuquerque is among those districts that get NAEP scores, and I’ll be studying our results with my colleagues. 

For example, I’m particularly interested in what’s going on with middle school, because our eighth-grade scores dropped in both math and reading. And I also want to know why our fourth graders posted flat scores in math while the nation overall made progress.

Of course, the work can’t just be about studying the data. We have to act on it, too. Our board has set for math, reading and college and career readiness, and we assess progress in these areas every month. We also hold our district’s leadership accountable for these goals, which ensures critical issues get the attention they deserve. For example, we’ve seen grade-level proficiency grow for targeted student groups from 11.3% in 2023 to 12.8% in 2024. The proficiency rate today is 2.5 percentage points higher than in 2022 and represents real learning for students who are Native American, African American, economically disadvantaged or English learners, or who have learning disabilities. 

If you’re a school board member, or a citizen who wants to see action on these issues, here are steps you can take today.

• Read the NAEP results. These are reported for the nation, by state and for 26 large urban districts. NAEP also disaggregates data by student subgroups. As a group, Hispanic eighth graders nationwide saw the biggest declines in reading and math. It warrants asking how they are doing in your community. 
• Think about questions you want to ask your school district leaders after looking at the data. 
• Set measurable goals based on multiple, reliable data sources. Use your power, either as a board member or engaged parent or citizen, to hold your district accountable for meeting them. 
• Don’t forget about non-academic data points. The Nation’s Report Card includes student survey data on confidence and chronic absenteeism, both of which are improving somewhat but aren’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Analyze this data and see if it offers insights into the well-being of your students and the culture and climate of your schools.

As a parent, I experienced the frustration of seeing my sixth grader doing fourth-grade work during the pandemic. I could clearly see the problem because she went to school virtually from my kitchen table. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get school or district officials to respond to my concerns. That is among the reasons I ran for the board. From this perch, I know school board members can play a leading role in ensuring that schools are responsive to student needs and parent concerns. But they can’t do that unless they turn their attention to the things that really matter. 

It was the third attempt in two years.

With the school year winding down, some districts never even got word the program existed. Those that participated quickly scrambled to cram it into their schedules.

“The timing wasn’t optimal,” said Matt Montaño, superintendent of the Bernalillo Public Schools, north of Albuquerque, and one of just five districts out of the state’s 89 to sign up. Staff members, he said, were “a little bit less than enthusiastic” about the interruption.

The late rollout was only the most recent snag in the state’s troubled effort to spend millions in federal relief funds for tutoring before the deadline to use the money hits next month.

The first attempt — with an on-demand, virtual provider — met with a meager response from families. A second try never got off the ground because of a contract mishap the state still won’t fully explain. And the delayed start on the third effort means only a fraction of the students slated for tutoring got it. State officials estimate that between 2,000 and 3,000 students received the extra help — far less than the 8,000 they were hoping to reach.

“Clearly, it was not the best,” Amanda DeBell, New Mexico’s deputy education secretary, said of the condensed program. But in July, the legislature pumped new life into the effort, providing $8.5 million for high-dosage tutoring this fall. The state also plans to use what’s left of the $4 million in federal relief funds that they’d hoped to spend last school year to support math tutoring for middle school students.

Data shows New Mexico students still have a lot of ground to make up to combat pandemic learning loss. The state in fourth grade math and reading in the most recent iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The experience underscores the difficulty of pulling off a statewide tutoring effort — even one backed by convincing research and millions of dollars in federal relief funds.

At a May tutoring conference at Stanford University, Education Secretary Arsenio Romero spoke candidly about the state’s false starts. 

“Sometimes we as educators are our own worst enemies,” he said. “We go through year-long cycles before we … make changes. You need to be able to pivot.” 

‘All the way to the living room’

Especially when the needs are so great. 

On state tests, less than a quarter of New Mexico students meet math standards and just 38% score proficient in English language arts. The state also continues to operate under to improve education for English learners and low-income, special education and Native American students.

In late 2022, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced the state had signed a with Paper, a virtual, on-demand tutoring company. The promised to offer students in high-poverty elementary and middle schools — those hit hardest by school closures — up to 20 hours of free tutoring.

But the state abruptly terminated the contract less than three months later. The model expected families to sign up for help on nights and weekends, which research shows who are furthest behind. Those students might not know the right questions to ask a tutor, and technical glitches associated with online programs tend to frustrate both kids and parents who are already discouraged.

“This service is not providing the results in terms of engagement, support or delivery of service to the state’s students,” Mariana Padilla, then-interim secretary of education, wrote to the company.

Montaño in Bernalillo doesn’t think any students in his district signed up for the program. “Deployment from the state level all the way to the living room of families is a hugely difficult process,” he said.

Paper officials cited multiple reasons for the rocky rollout. The program launched just as students returned from holiday break in January 2023, and the state didn’t give the company enough time to get buy-in from families and schools, said spokeswoman Ava Paydar.

Re-envisioning tutoring 

Romero, appointed secretary by Lujan Grisham in March 2023, faced the immediate challenge of finding a more-effective tutoring provider.

“It really … allowed us to re-envision what we wanted tutoring to look like,” he said at the Stanford conference. 

Three months after it canceled Paper’s contract, the state education department for vendors who could offer a high-impact model, either in person or virtually. The virtual classes that predominated during the height of the pandemic set students back academically by months, even years. But research shows that live instruction from a tutor working remotely can produce positive results if schools schedule sessions during the school day and offer the same consistent and frequent support as an in-person tutor.

The state chose three providers, who were slated to begin serving students last August. But officials abruptly canceled that program before it got started because of a protest from another vendor that wasn’t chosen. The department declined to explain the nature of the dispute, and Romero said the education department never finalized contracts with the three providers.

Some education advocates grew impatient as they watched the school year go by without a program in place. 

“We failed to offer consistent access to quality, high-impact tutoring,” said Amanda Aragon, executive director of NewMexicoKidsCAN, part of a national network of education policy and advocacy groups. She called the spring effort “in no way sufficient.”

While New Mexico may have faced more obstacles than most, other states trying to provide tutoring to thousands of students have weathered similar ordeals.

New Jersey to get funding to districts to hire tutors, and Virginia initially got a from districts when Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced his new All in VA plan, which includes high-impact tutoring in third through eighth grades. In Louisiana, some vendors passed on participating in a program that pays for one-to-one sessions — about half what providers normally charge. 

“Any state that was ambitious enough to take on large-scale implementation of tutoring has experienced growing pains,” said Nakia Towns, chief operating officer of Accelerate, a funding tutoring programs and research. Many have struggled to find high-quality vendors and convince districts to participate. 

With the new state funding, New Mexico is trying something different. The state will provide the money, but districts will issue their own contracts and have flexibility to hire teachers or choose the outside vendors they want. 

District efforts

One reason New Mexico leaders ultimately changed course is that they saw that districts had succeeded in blending tutoring into the school day.

Ten Las Cruces schools participated in a program this past school year with , a virtual model led by credentialed educators. Students who were a grade level or more behind gained roughly twice as much learning as those who didn’t get tutoring, leading the district to invite the provider back this fall, said co-founder Rahul Kalita.

Romero visited one of the district’s schools in October and saw Spanish-speaking students practicing their English skills with a bilingual tutor while also getting math support.

Kalita attributed some of the state’s prior difficulties to a lack of “steady leadership” at the top. Romero is New Mexico’s third education secretary since 2019.

“Funding is critical, but it’s just the first step,” he said.

Further evidence on in-school tutoring comes from on a virtual model that has helped prepare over 500 New Mexico middle school students for high school algebra. The program, continuing this fall, is used in large districts like Chicago, Miami-Dade and Fulton County, Georgia. In New Mexico, the effort includes 19 districts, many of them small and isolated, like Tatum Municipal Schools. 

Located about 15 miles from the Texas border, the rural district had just 26 seventh graders last school year. All of them received tutoring, and over half met or exceeded goals by the spring. That’s a small improvement over their scores from sixth grade, said Superintendent Robin Fulce, but he considers that progress significant because of the “big jump” in rigorous material in seventh grade.

The program has convinced Fulce that students can form tight relationships even with tutors they meet online. 

Recently, two of those tutors passed through town for a visit.

“They brought doughnuts and every kid in that seventh grade went over and hugged them. “It was a very good experience,” Fulce said. To him, the state’s multiple tutoring efforts reinforced that offering services outside the school day doesn’t benefit “kids who need it the most.”

The results, Romero said, influenced the state’s decision to shift gears and make “decisions based on research and data.”

Montaño, the Bernalillo superintendent, estimated that about 800 students in his district received services — roughly half those he felt should have gotten the support. But he doesn’t consider it a wasted effort.

“It was too good of an opportunity for us not to take advantage” of it, he said. 

High school students in New Mexico who studied law enforcement, architecture, manufacturing, information technology and other career technical areas showed success in the classroom last year.

For the more than 64,000 New Mexican high schoolers who were part of their local school district’s Career Technical Education programs, 95.7% graduated in 2023.

The overall statewide graduation rate for all students was 76.7%.

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Last school year Janelle Taylor Garcia went on several visits to high schools in Gadsden, Bernalillo and Hatch with her boss, Public Education Department Secretary Aresenio Romero.

They observed how millions in new state investments, and changes to graduation requirements, set up a successful path for students participating in that want to enter the workforce right out of high school.

Taylor Garcia described program leaders at various school districts as innovative and hands-on.

“​​When I toured the (Hatch Valley Public Schools) campus this past semester, I met with Principals, CTE faculty, fiscal and data systems staff members, and learned about exciting educational programming,” she said.

At Hatch Valley Public Schools they saw career technical education – referred shorthandly as CTE – curriculum in classrooms that students can “use immediately” in areas such as agricultural power structures, greenhouse development, animal care and services. The instruction on those areas provided students with realistic hands-on experience at school, Taylor Garcia said.

Bernalillo Public Schools expanded its Innovative Learning Space where students can learn about advanced technology and robotics.

And the Gadsden Independent School District “is actively responding to student requests for CTE Programs of Study,” said Taylor Garcia, the public education spokesperson. The district established a law enforcement program of study based on student request and the demand for those workers in the area.

Taylor Garcia also explained that recent legislative funds and outside grants have assisted in expanding the reach of CTE programs. to CTE programs through general appropriations and the funding has been made available at the local level through statewide grants.

in 2023 expanded the reach to include schools funded by the Bureau of Indian Education to accept career technical education grants.

Taylor Garcia said programs vary by school, but the career concentrations that use the most state funding for CTE are architecture, construction, manufacturing, information technology and health sciences.

Other recent CTE funding includes a Careers2Communities grant awarded to the College and Career Readiness Bureau in 2020 and a “new” grant awarded to the department in 2023.

This funding was directed to develop a curriculum that “embeds career exploration into core academic content, especially math courses,” Taylor Garcia said, as well as make CTE resources more accessible to students with disabilities.

in 2024 also for students entering ninth grade in the 2025-2026 school year. Students will be required to take one unit of a career cluster course, workplace readiness or a language class other than English. A two-unit pathway for students that can include CTE programs will also be required.

Students are considered part of the CTE program if they complete two or more courses in a career cluster program.

Graduation rates were also higher in “at-risk” subgroups of students in a CTE track.

New Mexico is mandated to reform its education models for these students. The Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit, that is the court’s order to the reform, identifies this group as students with disabilities, living in poverty, English learners and Native Americans.

Graduation rates for these students who are in CTE concentrations were all above 97% in 2023, according to the state.

Going forward, a Career and Technical Education Statewide Advisory Board will launch in August and to unify the different groups already established in the state to support CTE programs, Taylor Garcia said. The board is a collaboration between the Career Technical Leadership Project and the PED’s College and Career Readiness Bureau.

The first meeting is scheduled for Aug. 9 and will include business, industry and education representatives from across the state.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Shaun Griswold for questions: info@sourcenm.com. Follow Source New Mexico on and .

For the third year in a row, New Mexico is last in the nation for child welfare, according to the released this week.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation prepares the report for all 50 states. Its mission to track child well being in the country focuses on compiling federal data on four factors: family and community, education performance, overall health and economic reality.

New Mexico historically falls at the bottom of this report. Its best placement was in 2021 when the state climbed to 49th in the rankings.

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The 2024 report shows (42nd) and (43rd) as states with similar issues to New Mexico’s. (17th) and (3rd) are neighboring states leading on child welfare, the report shows.

Utah was also listed as number one in the nation for the Family and Community indicator that measures teen pregnancies, the number of children in single parent households, living in poverty and the education outcomes in their households.

New Mexico sits near the bottom of the list for that indicator but it is also the one where the state has shown the most improvement since 2019 with more kids living in economically stable homes with better educated parents. Teen births are also down in New Mexico since 2019.

On the other hand, education outcomes in New Mexico and across the country saw declines in three of the four indicators, specifically in reading and math proficiency.

Deficiencies in education

New Mexico’s education performance tracked with the rest of the nation while starting with a notably higher rate of children not proficient in fourth grade reading (79% up from 76% in 2019) and eighth grade math (87% up from 79% in 2019).

“New Mexico’s ranking in the education domain is heavily impacted by national standardized test scores, including fourth grade reading proficiency,” Emily Wildau, KIDS COUNT coordinator at New Mexico Voices for Children, said in a news release. “These scores do not reflect the ability of our children, but rather an education system that is not designed with our multicultural, multilingual students in mind.”

The state’s K-12 Plus Program is mentioned in the report as an example of a state “bolstering services and resources that equip kids to learn.” and signed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.

House Bill 130 changed part of the Public School Code to extend instructional time requirements for elementary and secondary education. It also allows for an increase in funding from the state if local school districts and charter schools extend the learning calendar past 180 days, or 155 days for districts with four-day school weeks.

However, the decision to extend the school year is a topic lawmakers, schools boards, educators, students and parents have had differing opinions on. The law setting school calendars based on hours,

Health indicators help then hurt New Mexico’s score

Health indicators over the last decade have helped improve the state’s scores, but improvements appear to have stagnated over the last couple of years.

The number of New Mexico children without health insurance improved between 2019 and 2022, according to the data book. But the state also reported an increase in babies born at a low birth weight and an increase in deaths of children and teens.

In 2022, New Mexico experienced 40 child or teen deaths per 100,00 compared to the national average of 30 deaths per 100,000. And nearly 10% of babies born in New Mexico were born at low birth weight.

Meanwhile, the state also reported some improvement in the family and community sector, including a decrease in teen births.

Solutions for addressing overall child well being

The KIDS COUNT report offered several solutions for states to consider when addressing overall child well being, including the implementation of more community schools throughout the school districts in the states.

Community schools are public schools that work to meet the needs of children outside of traditional education. This includes providing regular meals to children and families, mental health services and connections to other areas of support.

According to the New Mexico Public Education Department, , with 91 schools receiving state grant funding through the department.

The wraparound services provided through community schools were highlighted in the databook as beneficial for addressing factors in children’s home life that might make it a struggle for them to learn in school.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Shaun Griswold for questions: info@sourcenm.com. Follow Source New Mexico on and .

And some leave for kindergarten knowing how to read. 

“But it’s not because we’re hounding them,” said Heather Lyons, the program’s coordinator. “It’s because we’re constantly trying to help them pursue this love of learning.”

That careful mix of academics and social skills is one reason demand for the program is strong. Parents start calling in January to ask about registering their kids for the fall, Lyons said. Lamar’s program is part a statewide pre-K initiative now serving a quarter of the state’s 4-year-olds — up from about 3% six years ago.

The state helped drive pre-K enrollment nationwide to record levels in 2022-23, according to the recent from the National Institute for Early Education Research. Following sharp declines during the pandemic, participation in preschool is back on the upswing. Over 1.6 million children attended public pre-K last school year, with the percentage of 3-and 4-year-olds hitting new highs. 

Expanding access, however, doesn’t mean states have to cut back on quality by lowering training requirements for teachers or increasing class sizes, the report’s authors note.

They point to Mississippi as an example of a state that’s managed to boost enrollment while maintaining high standards.

In fact, the state is among the few that have written the institute’s “quality benchmarks” . Those include having teachers with a bachelor’s degree, assistants with early-childhood training, and screenings for vision, hearing and health problems.

“We’re keeping an eye on them,” said Allison Friedman-Krauss, an assistant research professor at the institute. “They started small with a focus on quality. They are also working hard to fund more coaches to support teachers, so they’re committed to quality in that way.”

There are now 36 early learning collaboratives — local partnerships that include school districts, Head Start providers and child care centers — that offer the pre-K program.

“We’re moving out of the baby stage and into the teen stage of the law,” said Rachel Canter, executive director Mississippi First, an advocacy group. She added that including Head Start, the federal preschool program serving children in poverty, is one reason the program receives bipartisan support. “People across the political spectrum see how it can benefit their own community. That has allowed us to expand it statewide while also making sure kids who need it most are getting access.”

Due partly to her advocacy, the legislature has increased annual spending on the program five times since 2016.

Now the challenge is to increase the number of child care providers that participate and continue to expand, she said. 

In communities without a program, parents are often left with lower-quality options or end up juggling their child between multiple caregivers during the day. Other parents, Canter said, might take fewer hours at work to stay home with their children. “That’s a terrible situation for a working family.”

Supporting the workforce

Advocates and policymakers are often the forces behind efforts to expand early-childhood education. But in — another state making major moves in pre-K — it was the voters who demanded more access when they passed a by an overwhelming 73%. 

The law creates permanent funding for early learning, resulting in the legislature appropriating last year. School districts, child care providers and tribal governments are now using some of those funds to by boosting teacher pay to match what K-12 teachers receive, using high-quality curriculum and giving preschoolers an extended school day.

The state also provides for teachers still earning their degree and pays for substitutes so teachers can take time off to attend courses.  

“The early childhood workforce has just been historically undervalued,” said Sara Mickelson, deputy secretary of the state’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department. “We’re really a state that is supporting access to degrees.”

Meanwhile, 70% of New Mexico 4-year-olds now attend public preschool, making the state one of just a handful that serves at least two-thirds of eligible students.

But states serving the most preschoolers — like California, Florida and Texas —  are not always examples of high quality.

California spent over $830 million in 2022-23 on preschool and is moving toward making all 4-year-olds eligible for its transitional kindergarten program by the fall of 2025. That figure accounted for over 70% of the total $1.17 billion increase in spending for the whole country, said Steve Barnett, the institute’s senior co-director.

But since it began a decade ago, the transitional program has met only a few of the institute’s 10 quality indicators. Teachers weren’t required to have special training in educating young children and class sizes were far larger than recommended — , compared with the institute’s benchmark of 20.

“There were no guidelines from the state,” said Rahele Arakabi, director of educational services for the Washington Unified School District in West Sacramento. Classrooms, she said, looked more like first grade than pre-K, with students sitting in rows facing the whiteboard. “Teachers really were in that mode of drill and kill.” 

But the outlook for the program has improved. Statewide, class sizes are now capped at 24 students with two teachers; and charters that don’t comply face fines. By the 2025-26 school year, ratios will be set at the institute’s standard of 10-to-1. The state also offers a new credential for educators teaching preschool through third grade, and by next year, teachers will be required to have or experience in early-childhood education. 

In Washington Unified, which serves 130 transitional kindergarten students in six classes, ratios are even lower, 8-to-1. Some teachers who worked in the district’s separate preschool program have already earned a credential to teach in transitional kindergarten.

Arakabi used a $400,000 to make classrooms more child-friendly, with age-appropriate furniture and play areas. She implemented a new curriculum specifically for pre-K and provided a year of coaching and support on child development. The investment, she said, is making a difference.

“My worry was always buying curriculum and then it just sits there in the shrink wrap,” she said. “This group of teachers is not easy to please,  but they’re actually using it.”

Graduation season is typically a time for celebrating the success of students making it through their education programs.

For some Indigenous students, part of that celebration includes having tribal regalia or objects of cultural significance as part of their cap and gown during the graduation ceremony.

In Arizona, Indigenous students are protected under state law. In 2021, then-Gov. Doug Ducey signed  into law, barring public schools from preventing Indigenous students from wearing traditional tribal regalia or objects of cultural significance at graduation ceremonies.

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Not all states have similar laws to protect Indigenous students. , but it’s now unclear if that applies to a case garnering attention in Farmington, New Mexico.

On May 13, Genesis White Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, was standing for the national anthem alongside her graduating class at the Farmington High School graduation ceremony when two unidentified school faculty members approached her to confiscate her graduation cap.

, White Bull is seen being instructed to remove her graduation cap, which was embellished with an eagle plume and beaded around the rim.

Brenda White Bull, Genesis’ mother, shared the experience with the Navajo Nation Council and reported that school officials later cut the plume from her daughter’s cap using scissors.

The Navajo Nation Council stated in a press release that Brenda emphasized the sacred significance of the plume, which symbolizes achievement and cultural identity, marking Genesis’ transition into new phases of her life.

The Arizona Mirror contacted the family for an interview, but the family did not respond before publication.

Navajo Nation Council Speaker Crystalyne Curley called Farmington High School’s actions “belittling, humiliating, and demeaning to the student and her family.

“There is no place for this type of behavior in our educational systems,” Curley said in a press release. “The school officials owe an apology to the student and her family.”

Farmington Municipal Schools, which oversees Farmington High School,  in response to the incident.

“During the event, a student’s beaded cap was exchanged for a plain one. The feather was returned intact to the family during the ceremony,” Farmington Municipal Schools wrote in the statement. “The beaded cap was returned after graduation concluded.”

Farmington Municipal Schools referred to the district’s protocols, which state that graduation caps and gowns can not be altered, per the .

The handbook does not contain policy language stating any exceptions to these rules. However, the school’s statement noted that students could choose their clothing attire, which included traditional attire to be worn under the graduation cap and gown, regalia, stoles, and feathers in their tassels.

“Students were informed throughout the school year and immediately before graduation of the protocol, including that beaded caps were not allowed,” the statement read. “This standard process helps us set student attire during graduations.”

“While the staff involved were following district guidelines, we acknowledge this could have been handled differently and better,” the statement read. “Moving forward, we will work to refine our processes at the school level.”

Farmington Municipal Schools stated that the district is also committed to exploring policies that allow for additional appropriate cultural elements in student attire. Indigenous students comprise nearly 34% of the school district’s population.

“School officials across the country need to be reminded who the first Americans are and whose land they inhabit,” Curley said in a press release. “No student in any school should be prohibited from wearing regalia that signifies their cultural and spiritual beliefs.”

New Mexico passed that might protect students against the Farmington schools district policy.

However, the legal pathway is unclear according to responses from spokespeople in the governor’s offices, state education department, and even lawmakers who wrote the recent law.

Each acknowledged that they were reviewing the law and could only give an official opinion once that was completed. Requests for comment were made to the New Mexico Department of Justice but were not returned in time for publication.

 (D-Albuquerque), who co-sponsored the law, said the legislation stemmed from the national Crown Act push that targeted to stop policies that discriminate against hair style and texture, with a significant tilt against African Americans.

New Mexico’s version was written from the views of the Native American cultures present throughout the state, Pope said, and the bill included .

“We wanted to make sure that we included cultural and religious headdresses to be even more inclusive than your hair alone,” he said. “And what I think is important in that language, when we look at Indigenous cultures, feathers are so cherished and protected and it is part of who they are.”

It’s unclear now if the law will provide White Bull support for any legal action she could take against Farmington Municipal Schools District.

‘It broke my heart’

After footage of White Bull’s graduation experience spread on social media, it sparked an outpouring of support from Indigenous people and communities across the country.

Navajo Nation leaders have voiced their support for White Bull and called for schools to support an Indigenous student’s right to wear regalia during their graduation ceremonies, saying denying it is a violation of their rights.

“It broke my heart,” Navajo Nation Council Delegate Amber Crotty told the Arizona Mirror when she learned what happened to the student.

Crotty said graduations are meant to be one of the happiest moments of a student’s life, and White Bull’s experience was tarnished by having something so important taken away from her.

“That’s so traumatic and not the best way to approach these situations when it comes to our Native students,” Crotty said. “In a day of celebration, just for her to be attacked like that.”

Crotty said the incident has been reported to the Nation Human Rights Commission, which investigates discrimination within border towns.

Farmington borders the Navajo Nation, and there is against Indigenous people living or visiting the city.

In April 1974, three white Farmington High School students brutally murdered four Navajo men as part of a practice locals called “Indian rolling.”

In response to the murders, Navajo and other Indigenous people held protests in the city of Farmington denouncing the pervasive racism and bigotry of the community.

Due to escalating tensions in Farmington, the New Mexico Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights launched a study of the relationships between the city, San Juan County and the Navajos living in the community and on the Navajo Nation.

The committee concluded that Indigenous people in almost every area suffer from injustice and maltreatment, . They recommended that city officials and San Juan County officials, in conjunction with Navajo leaders, work together to develop a plan of action to improve the treatment of Navajos living in the border areas of northwestern New Mexico.

The advisory committee conducted another report 30 years later and found that, while race relations may have somewhat improved in the area, racism is still an issue within the city of Farmington.

“There is a lack of understanding of how Native students identify themselves and celebrate themselves,” Crotty said.

She said that it is time to move beyond having conversations about cultural sensitivity for Native students, mainly because incidents like this keep occurring.

“That’s why we want to support mom and the family,” Crotty said. “She does want the school to be accountable, and she does want some sort of apology.”

Crotty said the staff’s actions at Farmington High School were inappropriate, and immediate action is needed rather than the school trying to justify what happened.

“The cultural identity of all Native American students attending Farmington High School are protected under the ,” she said, adding that what happened was a clear violation of the student’s rights.

“As we move forward in addressing this issue, we will be meeting with the school board and administration,” Crotty added.

In New Mexico, the law passed in 2021 is directed specifically to local school districts, but it does not allow the New Mexico Public Education Department to issue any statewide order on local issues, such as what students can wear at graduation ceremonies.

New Mexico’s 89 school districts decide on those policies, which is why other Indigenous students across the state have different experiences with graduation attire.

New Mexico’s Public Education Secretary, Dr. Aresenio Romero, offered support for White Bull but noted that the issue is the responsibility of the local district.

“I expect the Farmington Superintendent and school district to reevaluate their graduation policies,” Romero said. “I remain committed to promulgating tribal sovereignty and to respecting tribal cultural customs and practices.”

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued a statement Friday saying that it was unacceptable that a student was reprimanded for representing their culture during a time of celebration.

“I appreciate that the Farmington schools acknowledge that they could have handled this situation better and that their policy may be too restrictive,” she added. “However, it shouldn’t have required the student raising this issue for a school to recognize its lack of inclusivity.”

Navajo Nation First Lady Jasmine Blackwater-Nygren released a statement supporting Indigenous graduating students who wear their cultural and traditional regalia during graduation.

“We stand with our Native graduates this graduation season and their decision to wear their traditional tribal regalia or objects of cultural significance, including eagle feathers, eagle plumes, and beaded graduation caps,” Blackwater-Nygren said in . “Our graduates and families take immense pride in what they choose to wear on graduation day.”

Blackwater Nygren was a guest speaker at the Farmington High School graduation, but she said she was unaware of what occurred until after the graduation.

“I am deeply disappointed that this happened at a school where we have many Navajo and Native graduates,” she said. “I hope the school learns from this experience and can take corrective measures.”

Blackwater-Nygren said that, for many Indigenous students, deciding what to wear goes far beyond simply deciding what color dress or shoes to wear. For some Indigenous students, it is a day for them to wear their traditional regalia proudly.

“Our regalia reminds us of how far we’ve come as a people; it shows our pride in our culture and how we chose to identify ourselves as Native people,” she said. “Some graduates are the first in their families to graduate or are only one of a few high school graduates in the family. A beaded cap further signifies this symbol of achievement, accomplishment and Native resilience.”

Blackwater-Nygren is familiar with this issue because, as an Arizona State Representative, she helped pass  through the legislature.

“As graduation season continues, I hope all schools will respect the decision of our Native students to wear their traditional regalia and objects of cultural significance,” Blackwater-Nygren said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Shaun Griswold for questions: info@sourcenm.com. Follow Source New Mexico on and .

State officials are looking to hire workers — teachers and non-teachers alike — to teach elementary and middle school students how to read this summer.

The New Mexico Summer Reading Program will provide reading instruction in small group, four-hour classes of children ranging in age from those becoming kindergarteners to ninth graders.

People hired to help children read will start the program in June and continue for four to six weeks through July, according to a news release.

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The deadline to apply is May 24; however, the state is encouraging people to apply by May 17 so they can start in June.

More information and the application can be found at . The program’s website shows 42 summer reading locations across New Mexico.

Three state agencies, the New Mexico Public Education Department, the Higher Education Department and the Early Childhood Education and Care Department said Monday they need “hundreds of additional instructors” for the program, which has a goal to serve 10,000 students.

“You do not need to be a licensed teacher to become a literacy instructor, but we encourage retired educators and educators on summer break to consider joining this historic statewide literacy effort,” said Public Education Secretary Arsenio Romero.

Summer reading instructors would make $35 per hour, according to the news release. That’s significantly higher than the in New Mexico of $20 per hour.

People would have to commit to working for at least 25 hours per week.

The weeklong training will be paid at the same rate $35 per hour rate.The specialized training will be done by literacy experts prior to the program, at the end of May or the beginning of June.

New Mexico ranks 50th in literacy with 79% of fourth grade students reading below grade level, to the children’s literacy nonprofit Reading is Fundamental.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Shaun Griswold for questions: info@sourcenm.com. Follow Source New Mexico on and .

Kim, a 12th grade student at West Lafayette High School, discovered his dog, Joy, had heartworm disease and ordered medicine through an online pharmacy.

But the medicine Kim ordered would not only be ineffective but also aggravate Joy’s illness even more.

Motivated by his dog’s health scare, Kim designed a way for people to verify the authenticity of pharmaceutical products — by printing an edible QR code directly on the medicine.

Kim was one of in middle and high school who presented their inventions and research projects focused on solving key global issues at the in Washington, DC.  

“There have been countless tragedies and deaths caused by either substandard, falsified or diverted pharmaceutical products,” Kim told The 74. “So I’m glad to have had this opportunity to raise more awareness of counterfeit medicine.”

Hosted by and the , student innovators were selected from an array of nationwide competitions, including the where more than 2,500 students submitted projects across six categories: Environmental Stewardship, Future Foods, Health & Medicine, Powering the Planet, Tech for Good and Space Innovation.

Here are five student innovators featured at the National STEM Festival:

Joshua Kim, 18

West Lafayette High School · West Lafayette, Indiana

Among more than 50,000 online pharmacies worldwide, Kim found only 3 percent operate and distribute medicine legally — contributing to the annual deaths of over one million people.

Kim said the measures most pharmacies use to reduce counterfeit concerns are “limited by low security,” such as only tracking medicine through its exterior packaging.

“It’s easy for medicine to be removed from their packaging…and dose level securities are either limited by the need for expensive technology or trained personnel,” Kim said.

“So this means patients at home do not have access to ways of verifying their medicine.”

Kim believes his edible QR code will allow people to ensure they are receiving genuine and legitimate medicine.

Ashley Valencia, 17

Harvest Preparatory Academy · Yuma, Arizona

Self-conscious about her crooked teeth, Arizona high schooler Ashley Valencia saw how expensive dental care can be growing up in a low-income family. But it wasn’t just her family that couldn’t afford dental care — many of her neighbors also struggled to afford it. 

Valencia, a 12th grade student at Harvest Preparatory Academy, channeled her insecurity to help students in developing countries who have even less access to proper oral hygiene products — by creating an affordable toothpaste and mouthwash using their native plants.

“I always knew I wanted to do something in medicine so when I thought about different [research] topics close to me, I started to think about my past experiences,” Valencia told The 74.

“That’s why I created my own oral treatments that were easily accessible and affordable to people who might not have access to the things I had,” she added.

Valencia said she shared her research with public schools in the Philippines to address their students’ dental concerns.

At the festival, Valencia said she plans to travel to developing countries across South and Southeast Asia to share her oral hygiene products.

“Because I come from a school that doesn’t have a lot of resources…being able to attend the festival and present my research to all of the important people that were there was really exciting,” Valencia said.

Clarisse Telles Alvares Coelho, 18

New Mexico Military Institute · Roswell, New Mexico

From lion’s mane to king oyster, New Mexico high schooler and longtime vegetarian Clarisse Telles Alvares Coelho loves eating all types of mushrooms.

Coelho, a 12th grade student at the New Mexico Military Institute, said the misconceptions of mushrooms inspired her research project on their health benefits — particularly the abundance of a soluble fiber called beta-glucan.

“I knew many people didn’t like mushrooms…but what if I was able to make them change their minds,” Coelho told The 74. “With beta-glucan acting in your immune system, our metabolism works faster.”

Coelho said she was “very surprised” to have the opportunity to present her project at the festival.

“It was such a great feeling because there was so much hard work and late nights put into researching this project…[so] it was so amazing to be recognized,” Coelho said.

Alicia Wright, 17

Rockdale Magnet School for Science and Technology · Conyers, Georgia

Concerned by our global carbon footprint, Georgia high schooler Alicia Wright discovered the majority of CO2 emissions come from the cement used in construction.

Wright, an 11th grade student at Rockdale Magnet School for Science and Technology, found a way to replace cement with mycelium — a type of fungi that can be transformed into a biodegradable construction material.

“I was inspired by the complexity of mycelium and how fungus works,” Wright told The 74. “This will better the environment so that future generations can enjoy as we have.”

At the festival, Wright said the diversity of students presenting their projects with her felt “empowering.”

“It was very encouraging to see people with my skin color and gender presenting with me,” Wright said.

Haasini Mendu, 16

William Mason High School · Mason, Ohio

Ohio high schooler Haasini Mendu came up with a way to improve medication dosage for Parkinson’s disease — a disorder that causes involuntary body movement, often called tremors.

Mendu, an 11th grade student at William Mason High School, designed a wearable device that quantifies the number of tremors someone has and automatically sends the information to an app she created called “TremorSense.”

She said the information is processed through an “AI-based machine learning” filter to distinguish between tremor and non-tremor movements.

Mendu said the opportunity to meet other students and build connections was her favorite part of the festival.

“It was very easy to make some friends and also learn about their very cool inventions and ideas,” Mendu told The 74.

“Having this recognition…feels motivating to continue working on my skills [because] there were so many people interested in what I’m trying to do with my research.”

Each state deployed the American Rescue Plan Act funds to stabilize their child care sectors. The success of the American Rescue Plan stabilization funding provided the impetus for select states to dedicate their own resources to continue the investments. Whether the product of years or organized lobbying, or a decision to reroute surplus funds back to families and educators, 11 states and the District of Columbia have taken concrete steps to shore up their own child care sectors.

from The Century Foundation, authors Julie Kashen and Laura Valle-Gutierrez detail the how and why of states deciding to invest in child care. Kashen was kind enough to share some of her insights from the report with Early Learning Nation magazine. A lightly edited Q&A follows:

Rebecca Gale: It took the American Rescue Plan to show what so many advocates of robust social policy have been saying for decades: government investment works and can make a difference, stabilizing industries and lifting people out of poverty. But the moment the funds ran dry, many policymakers were satisfied to return to the status quo. What do you think changed from their initial support of ARPA to their unwillingness to continue what has been shown to positively impact so many lives?��

Julie Kashen: First, let’s acknowledge how bad the status quo was. Before anyone had heard of the COVID-19 pandemic, families struggled to find quality, affordable child care, and child care providers grappled to retain staff and afford basic necessities.

There were a lot of policymakers who were not satisfied to return to that status quo. In fact, the House of Representatives in November 2021, passed historic legislation proposed by President Biden — the Build Back Better Act — which included that would have lowered child care costs for nine out of 10 families with young children, while giving parents the choice to find the right program for their family in center-based, home-based, family-based, school-based and Head Start programs.

It would have expanded free preschool for three- and four-year-olds, raised wages in the early education sector and supported the cost of high-quality care. In fact, when ARPA passed, many envisioned that when the funding expired, there would be the foundation of a sustainable child care and early learning system in place. Unfortunately, that bill, with no support from Republicans, , and so did not become law.

When the funding expired, and both called for $16 billion in emergency child care funding to address the immediate needs caused by the child care stabilization funding cliff. So, I would argue that we have quite a number of policymakers fighting hard for change at the federal level, but being blocked in their progress by partisan politics.

RG: D.C. and the 11 states that opted to invest in child care are overwhelmingly “blue” states (D.C., California, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Vermont, Washington) with a handful of “red” or “purple” ones thrown in (Alaska, New Hampshire, Kentucky). to find affordable child care, despite party affiliation. What do you think sets the states apart that opted to direct extra funds to the child care sector?

JK: All of the states that deployed their own resources for stabilizing their child care sectors experienced the positive impact of the ARPA stabilization funds and saw the benefits to communities and local economies of putting resources into children and families. Most of the states had long-term organizing campaigns, including grassroots organizing and union campaigns, that combined with a moment of greater awareness of, support for child care and political leadership that helped them succeed.

It’s also worth noting that there are a number of “red” and “purple” states that took additional action leveraging federal funds. While we did not include them in our list of states that put their own resources in, the results of their leadership are similar using federal dollars. In , for example, after Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’ multiple attempts to move $356 million through the state legislature were blocked by legislative opponents, he reallocated $175 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to cover half of this gap. Missouri, Ohio and North Dakota are just some of the

RG: Ten states went through their state legislatures to take action, but New Mexico went through a ballot initiative to create a permanent fund which has the potential to offer some of the longest lasting impact (D.C. took action through the Office of the Mayor). Have you found that social issues like support for child care could do better at the ballot box than in state assemblies?

JK: We know child care is popular among voters regardless of political party. In fact, from GQR and the Child Care for Every Family Network shows four in five Republican parents of children under 18 (79%) support guaranteed child care, as do 83% of independent parents and 97% of Democrat parents. So, ballot initiatives are often a good route.

But it’s worth noting that more states improved their child care systems and invested in child care in 2023 than we have seen in any recent time, much of it because they finally had the federal resources to help. So, we now have clear evidence that when the federal government and states come together to take action, children, families and local economies all benefit.

That said, a concerning trend we also saw in 2023 was that when states found themselves with significant surpluses, rather than invest in families, that primarily benefited wealthy households and corporations. These tax cuts will reduce state revenues precisely at a time when more revenue is needed to invest in child care. The amount of lost state revenue will grow over time and make it even harder for these states to invest needed funding on child care and reap the economic benefits of those investments. Not only have these short-sighted tax cuts reduced states’ abilities to invest in child care programs, this lack of investment can induce further collapses in state revenues, since we know child care investments support local economies.

RG: Child care is an industry where the math will never quite add up. Your report quotes Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as saying the current state of the nation’s child care is “the textbook example of a broken market” since existing market forces cannot solve it. What about the nature of child care makes it both different from other market services, and makes it hard for people and policymakers to understand why federal investment is needed?

JK: Families across all income levels share the same determination to provide the best possible foundation for their children, especially in their early years. Two-thirds of children under age 6 have all of their parents (either solo or coupled) in the workforce. Parents need the freedom to afford child care and to have peace of mind that their children are safe and nurtured while parents go to work or to school and make the best choices for their families.

Most families don’t send children to fourth grade with a check to cover the cost of their teacher’s salaries or to maintain the school building. The same should be true for child care. Our shared interest in making sure our children thrive shouldn’t start when they turn five. Like public education, public libraries, safe food and clean drinking water, child care benefits all of us. And child care and early learning investments are as essential to economic growth as physical infrastructure or energy.

Most parents need child care at a time when they can least afford it because they are early in their career. This has particular impacts for families of color due to, at least in part, ongoing systemic and structural inequities that perpetuate overrepresentation of communities of color in jobs paying lower wages, the ranks of those experiencing higher unemployment rates, and families living below the federal poverty level. Unlike college tuition, which is also too expensive, parents don’t have eighteen years to plan and save. To access child care, families are forced to pay an amount put together patchwork solutions that create instability for their work lives and for their children, or be one of the fortunate few who receive child care assistance.

Meanwhile, will continue to put upward pressure on prices as child care businesses will have to raise wages to attract early educators – or go out of business. Even before the pandemic wreaked havoc on the child care sector, data from the Center for American Progress showed that more than half of families with young children live in a child care desert (a census tract where there are more than three times as many children as licensed child care slots).

Underlying all of this is the devaluing of care work in American society. One of the many legacies of slavery is the shouldering of care responsibilities by the people in our society with the least power and fewest resources. In the early twentieth century, white lawmakers excluded care workers—who were overwhelmingly Black women—from fair wages and labor protections to preserve the status quo. To this day, our culture and policies continue to undervalue caregiving, leaving caregivers underpaid or unpaid, and without the support they need to thrive.

This history has also contributed to the expectation that family care is an individual responsibility, rather than a communal one: if you struggle, there’s something wrong with you. In reality, care has been a universal need and a public good that requires public-policy-supported solutions, and now more than ever must be treated as such. This is why the pandemic removing the invisibility cloak from all of the hard work of caregiving that had been going on all along was so important.

RG: Even the most generous state support — like Vermont and New Mexico — is not a substitute for robust federal support. From a policy perspective, what could that federal support look like, and what do you think is possible in the existing political climate?

JK: The Build Back Better Act is the closest we’ve come to the robust, comprehensive child care and early learning system we’ve needed since . Build Back Better would have made sure that every family who needs it could find child care that works for their families, nurtures their children and doesn’t break the bank.

The, reintroduced in April of last year, took many of the lessons of the Build Back Better fight and the American Rescue Plan implementation, and built on a solid foundation to become an even stronger approach.

While Congressional champions, advocates and organizers work toward the next big opportunity, the immediate need is significant. The hope is that a combination of an increase in existing child care and early learning programs through the FY24 appropriations process and supplemental emergency child care funding will both make it through Congress as soon as possible.

RG: You’ve been researching and working on social policy for the better part of two decades, yet it took the COVID-19 pandemic to finally give child care its moment in the sun. As we move further away from the emergency lockdown phase of Covid, how do you think people will remember this time in our country’s evolution on public policy? Do you see this as a turning point?

JK: The turning point is that 1. People saw clearly the value of caregiving; 2. The government took historic action that worked and we can now point to as evidence of the value of these investments.

The pandemic underscored the importance of investing in our care infrastructure — it crystallized how caregiving makes all other work possible, and how our failure to treat care as a public good burdens families and stifles our economy. The U.S. investments in children and families during the pandemic demonstrated the life-changing and economy-sustaining power of equitable policy. The investments in child care, the child tax credit and increased home and community-based services for older adults and disabled people were historic, serving millions of families, reducing poverty and supporting more people to age with dignity at home.

I remain optimistic, but the ease with which many of these policies have since been allowed to sunset, or roll back, or be eliminated altogether shows the extent to which bias, discrimination, and inequity are built into our economic system and structures. Two steps forward, one step back — it’s frustrating, but it’s progress that we can keep building on.

At a joint budget session of the House and Senate education committees on Monday, lawmakers made clear their intent to prioritize literacy, staff shortages, attendance, pay increases, career technical education and improving outcomes for students.

Analysts with the New Mexico Legislative Education Study Committee and the Legislative Finance Committee proposed the following investments for such initiatives:

• $46.2 million for career technical education
• $25 million to raise the minimum salary for all school personnel to $30,000 per year
• $3 million for planning and design for a statewide literacy center
• $30 million in flexible funds for literacy, community schools and innovative projects
• $15 million for the Public Education Department’s education fellows program
• $15 million for attendance programs

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The $3 million for the literacy center is far below the governor’s request for $30 million.

New Mexico’s public education secretary Arsenio Romero also outlined plans to embed structured literacy within all New Mexico schools, something that is in line with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s priorities for the 2024 session.

“This has been proven time and time again to be the game-changer we need,” he said. “If we can have students become confident, competent readers at their grade level it’s going to have a positive effect on every other core area within their education but it’s also going to have a benefit for them their entire lives.”

He also requested $94.5 million for increases to teacher salaries and called on legislators to boost funding for the educator fellows program. The program provides coaching, hands-on experience and financial support to students who want to become certified educators.

“These teachers now that are in pre-service programs are getting that experience now so when they get their own classrooms they’re ready to roll and be successful, year one, day one,” Romero said.

Lawmakers expressed strong, bipartisan support for career technical education, calling it one of the biggest factors in student success.

Senate Education Committee Chair William Soules (D-Las Cruces) said he wanted to ensure there was sufficient funding for career technical education.

“When we are flush with money, education is the best place to put the extra money, not a place to try to do things on the cheap or see how much we can get for how little – but how much can we put into good programs that are going to make a difference,” Soules said.

Extended school hours drew bipartisan criticism from lawmakers concerned about smaller, rural schools. The New Mexico Public Education Department recently proposed a rule that would require all schools to have a minimum of 180 instruction days, forcing some schools to go from a four-day week to a five-day week.

“What happened to local control? Why do we have a school board when y’all are mandating sitting up here in Santa Fe that we are going to increase our school days?” said Rep. Candy Spence Ezzell (R-Roswell) “I am appalled by what’s happening in our schools. Our schools are excelling when there’s a smaller student-to-teacher ratio. It’s not going to improve just by adding more days on it.”

Ezzell said that additional costs for fuel, meals and utilities for rural schools to add an extra day would “break” small schools.

Some lawmakers expressed concern about making wise investments to support struggling students and meeting the guidelines in the Yazzie-Martinez ruling, a landmark public education reform case in New Mexico.

Rep. Yanira Gurrola (D-Albuquerque) expressed concern that there was not enough funding for bilingual education in any of the budget proposals. Legislative analysts found that there were at least 4,000 educators in New Mexico with bilingual certifications who were not teaching bilingual classes because of inadequate pay for an intense workload.

Gurrola this session which would create pipelines between the state’s colleges, universities and tribal colleges to bring bilingual educators into K-12 schools. She said in the committee meeting that it’s not enough for someone to be certified. It requires funding and resources for bilingual programs to be successful.

“Some of the schools who were presented to us as schools that beat the odds and were successful, they were trained in structural literacy and they were supplemented by other trainings to meet the needs of the diverse population,” Gurrola said.

Rep. Patricia Roybal Caballero (D-Albuquerque) said she wanted to see better data collecting and metrics to show skeptics where to invest money to comply with Yazzie-Martinez and help legislators make better decisions about education funding to support the state’s diverse student population.

“We’re not at risk. We’re exceptional. We come to the classroom exceptional, because of our language, because of our culture, because of what we bring to the table,” Roybal Caballero said. “Everybody else doesn’t understand that … We need to stop doing business as usual, which is all of this, and create something different.”