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“It’s not going to be a perfect year, but we have our best foot forward to start with this new school year… We can always come back, and I know [the calendar committee] will be turning around immediately to work on the calendar for the next school year.” President Yolanda Montoya-Cordova said. “It’s not perfect – it is not a perfect calendar; I can admit to that for sure.”

The Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education voted 5-1 to approve a new district calendar that adds four instructional days to the district’s upcoming school year last Wednesday. Danielle Gonzales was absent from last week’s meeting.  

The new calendar will also include four professional development days for staff, which is unlike the 2022-23 school year, because teachers did not have specific days for collaboration and lesson plan development. The professional development days replace a proposal to make some Wednesdays through the year early release days.

The new school year will include 182 days of instruction, with six-and-a-half hours of instructional time each day. That’s 150 more hours for elementary students, and 60 hours more for secondary school than the current school year. 

The new calendar will mean shorter summer and fall breaks, but longer winter and spring breaks.

New School Year Calendar

Before voting, the board of education heard from members of the public who opposed the new calendar. No one spoke in favor of it.

Opponents said that starting earlier in the summer would negatively affect family gatherings, and reduce the time students have to work during the summer to raise money for college. Several parents said there was not enough time for the board to review all comments from parents and staff. 

APS Discussion and Action

House Bill 130, which became law on March 16, requires elementary schools to increase instructional time from 990 hours to 1,140 hours per year, and secondary schools from 1,080 hours to 1,140.

Currently, APS works with multiple calendars, with different start and end dates. The new calendar standardizes the district’s schedule. The current calendar has 184 teacher contract days, 178 of which are instructional days. The new calendar will increase contract days to 188 and instructional days to 182 respectively.

The proposed Wednesday early release days would have been added to give teachers more time for professional learning and development time, along with new collaboration time, which teachers do not currently have dedicated; this collaboration and development time will now be allotted to teachers on professional development days. But community backlash convinced the board to keep regular Wednesdays and give teachers additional professional development days instead. Feedback from the community included concerns that early release Wednesdays would be detrimental to the mental health and educational stability of students, especially special education students. Another concern was the scheduling  availability of parents, as many said they would not be able to afford the cost of the afterschool programs their children need on early release while parents are at work.

“Obviously we know there are going to be holes no matter how we look at [the calendar].” Member Crystal Tapia Romero said.

Board member Peggy Muller-Aragon said that she does not support the extended calendar for younger children. She was the lone board member to vote against the calendar.

“It’s not going to be a perfect year, but we have our best foot forward to start with this new school year… We can always come back and I know [the calendar committee] will be turning around immediately to work on the calendar for the next school year,” President Yolanda Montoya-Cordova said. “It’s not perfect – it is not a perfect calendar; I can admit to that for sure.”

Key Dates

Teachers return to school: July 31

First day of school for students: August 3

Last day of school: May 31

Last day (TOPS schools) of school: June 10

The Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education

News

New Mexico has been steadily increasing its focus on structured literacy since 2019. A new law was signed to incentivize further progress.

On April 5, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed House Bill 481 into law, calling on school districts to align their literacy curriculum with more science-based practices. The bill will incentivize school districts to purchase materials that align with the science of reading, giving students across New Mexico an opportunity to access literacy education that is research-based in a bid to increase student success.

HB481 was introduced by Representative Ryan Lane (R – San Juan) on February 16. The bill allows school districts to purchase new high quality instructional materials for early literacy, which would be paid for with money from the Reading Materials Fund.

All of the new materials purchased with this funding must be, “aligned with explicit, systematic, diagnostic, cumulative instruction in phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics, syllable types, morphology, semantics and syntax.”

HB481 cleared its first hurdle in the New Mexico House of Representatives on March 13, passing the chamber with a 44-15 vote. Days later, on March 15, the bill passed the New Mexico Senate with a 40-0 vote.

How HB481 Works

The bill incentivizes school districts across the state to bring new learning materials into their district, using the state Reading Materials Fund. There are a few requirements school districts must meet in order to receive the funding. These requirements are intended to ensure that the money is spent on materials that will improve districts’ literacy rates.

Funds must be used by school districts to purchase core instructional materials that are on the New Mexico Kindergarten Through Eighth Grade English Language Arts, Spanish Language Arts, English Language Development and World Language Instructional Materials adopted list and have the structured literacy designation; or supplemental/intervention materials from the  Colorado Department of Education Advisory List for Instructional Programming. The bill also requires that a “detailed framework for structured literacy training” be included in the district’s professional development plan.

School districts must apply for this funding, giving them a choice in whether they choose to align their instructional materials with literacy best practice.

The bill will become law and go into effect on July 4.

Rep. Ryan Lane, sponsor of HB481 in

News

Prosecutors from the United States Department of Justice, law enforcement officials for Bernalillo County and the City of Albuquerque, and Albuquerque Public School district joined forces at the end of March to make a clear statement: Guns are not allowed on public school grounds. 

To make it clear to everyone that firearms are not allowed on school grounds, officials wanted to go on offense and clarify the penalties that will be imposed on those who bring guns onto school property.

Having a firearm on school grounds is a crime in New Mexico, but federal law goes further by making it a crime to have a firearm within 1,000 feet of any school. Together, the federal government and local officials are making it clear: Firearm-related offenses at APS will not be tolerated.

“My message to every student, to every member of this community, especially to the students: You may think that somehow bringing a gun to school might be cool,” Bernalillo District Attorney Sam Bregman said, “It’s not. Don’t ruin your life by bringing a gun onto a school campus.”

APS Superintendent Scott Elder said that so far in 2023, the school district has had 13 different instances where firearms were brought onto school campuses. “We’ve had a steady chorus of students and staff demanding that we do something about the gun threats on their campuses,” Elder said.

Taking the Threat Seriously

Bregman pledged to have an on-call prosecutor ready to target firearms-related offenses on school grounds, saying that the prosecutor will be available 24-hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a  year. “There will be zero tolerance and no excuses,” Bregman noted, “Don’t even think about bringing a gun on school grounds in Bernalillo County. You will be arrested and you will be prosecuted for a felony.”

Alex Uballez, U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico, said: “Our children deserve open playgrounds, they deserve to not have to walk through metal detectors, they deserve schools that don’t look like prisons. This is our city. This is our home. Let’s treat it with respect.”

Bernalillo County Manager Julie Morgas Baca agreed with the prosecutors, and said that Bernalillo County would be placing metallic “Gun-Free Zone” signs for schools across the county.

Even inadvertently bringing a gun onto school grounds is a crime. DA Bregman said this applies to everyone, even if a student drives to campus in a vehicle containing a firearm a parent forgot to remove. Bregman said that parents who do not properly lock up their firearms, and leave them within reach of students who take the weapons to school, will be prosecuted starting in June under the new Bennie Hargrove Gun Safety Act.

Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman, holding

Commentary

Editor’s Note: This article was written by Abigail Swisher of the National Council on Teacher Quality

My first year in the classroom, many of my fifth grade students still struggled to read. At the start of the year, each of my students was given a laminated bookmark that reminded them of the three strategies they should use when they didn’t know a word, including looking at pictures and using clues from the rest of the sentence to guess the word–strategies that have been debunked by research. Despite my best efforts, many of my students still struggled to read by the time they left my classroom. I would only learn years later that the reading curriculum I was assigned to teach them included methods that directly contradict the settled science on how to teach reading. 

Thanks to dedicated advocates, researchers and journalists like Emily Hanford, I eventually learned that the strategy described on these bookmarks, called “three-cueing,” was part of a debunked system of teaching children to read called Balanced Literacy. As awareness has grown about proven practices in what works to teach reading, many current and former teachers like me have become advocates for replacing Balanced Literacy with curricula that follow the science of how children learn to read. 

For its part, New Mexico began to move away from Balanced Literacy in 2019 and has made progress to advance a new ‘structured literacy’ approach based on the science of reading. This task has taken on increasing urgency given sobering results from the most recent Nation’s Report Card, which show that 52 percent of New Mexico 4th graders score below basic in reading. 

Since 2019, advocates and policymakers across the state have recognized that more must be done to build on the state’s progress. While the state’s 2019 literacy law shifted many aspects of how schools approach literacy, it did not explicitly require that districts adopt evidence-based reading curriculum in every classroom. 

In 2022, our team at the National Council on Teacher Quality set out to understand curriculum New Mexico districts were adopting to teach elementary reading. Our team conducted a survey of district leaders, followed by an analysis of curriculum spending data reported to the state by each district. Ultimately, we found that many districts could do more to adopt and skillfully implement research-aligned reading curriculum. 

Looking across New Mexico, districts’ use of high-quality curriculum was highly uneven. Using districts’ elementary reading curriculum purchases (reported by districts to the state) NCTQ compared these purchases to evaluations conducted by independent curriculum evaluator EdReports. Our analysis found that only 10 percent of curricula met expectations in all domains of quality in EdReports. 28 percent of curricula purchased received a score in the two lowest rating categories (“partially meets” or “does not meet” expectations) in one or more domains of quality. 

The majority of the curricula districts reported purchasing were difficult to evaluate for quality: 63 percent of total curriculum purchases reported by districts included insufficient evidence to determine their quality using EdReports.

Our analysis also found that some districts are purchasing curricula that go against what experts know works to teach children how to read. Several districts captured in our analysis reported using Fountas & Pinnell or Lucy Calkins’ Readers Workshop, the two most popular Balanced Literacy curricula, which have both received failing grades from independent curriculum evaluators.

At the same time, we were also deeply concerned by how difficult and labor intensive it is (even for a research organization) to understand what curricula districts in New Mexico use to teach reading. Using the state’s reported financial data and our additional contact with districts, NCTQ staff spent over 550 hours collecting and analyzing data in order to answer these questions–far more time than state officials likely have at their disposal. 

New Mexico has already taken important steps to adopt an approach based on the most up-to-date evidence on what we know works to teach children to read. Indeed, many New Mexico teachers have already received high-quality professional development in the science of reading–highlighting the disconnect between what teachers are being taught and the resources they are given.

Our results suggest that many teachers don’t yet have access to the necessary resources to successfully teach students to learn to read. Providing every teacher and every student access to high-quality curriculum aligned to scientifically-based literacy instruction (including all five foundational components of learning to read) is an essential next step to advance the state’s commitment to structured literacy.

Abigail Swisher is a former elementary teacher, education organizer, and current Policy and Programs Director at the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Abigail Swisher, National Council on Teacher Quality

News

Students across New Mexico will soon enjoy free lunch regardless of their family’s ability to pay, under a new law passed during this year’s legislative session and signed into law March 28.

The program makes New Mexico the fifth state in the nation to guarantee  free lunches for its students, but is the only state that requires the meals be nutritious.

Under Senate Bill 4, sponsored by Senate Majority Whip Michael Padilla (D – Bernalillo) and Sen. Leo Jaramillo (D – Los Alamos, Rio Arriba, Sandoval, Santa Fe), free student breakfast and lunch will begin in the 2023-2024 school year for all students.

“New Mexico is leading the nation by not only providing free healthy school meals to every student in our state, but we’re also making sure those meals are nutritious foods that kids want to eat,” said New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. “When we feed our children, we’re feeding our future – these investments today will yield benefits tomorrow through generations of healthier New Mexicans.”

The program makes school breakfast and lunch free for all students, regardless of family socioeconomic status. SB 4 sets aside $30 million from the state budget to cover the cost of the free meals.

The new law also sets aside $20 million to improve school kitchens, giving school staff a better opportunity to make healthy food from scratch. Over the summer of 2023, a rulemaking committee will decide what constitutes a healthy meal, according to the governor’s office. School districts will be given time to prepare for the new nutrition rules, which will not take effect for school districts until 2025.

“Healthy meals in schools lead to healthy young minds in our communities, and I’m incredibly proud of the partnerships we are forging to ensure every student has access to nutritious meals at school,” Sen. Padilla said at the bill-signing ceremony. “From the Hunger-Free Students’ Bill of Rights Act we passed six years ago ending lunchroom shaming, to this measure ensuring that every [student] will have access to free, nutritious meals, New Mexico continues to set a national example for addressing childhood food and nutrition security.

The Hunger-Free Students’ Bill of Rights Act was originally designed to end what is known as lunch shaming, where students who couldn’t afford their school lunch were given a meal separate from their peers in a way that singled them out.

“For many families in communities across New Mexico, access to a nutritious breakfast and lunch will fill an absolutely critical need, given that for some [students] these might be the only meals they have for that day,” Sen. Jaramillo said at the singing. “No child should ever have to suffer from being hungry.”

New Mexico Public Education Secretary Arsenio Romero in a statement equated nutritious meals, and their importance to the success of students, to textbooks, desks, and pencils.

Senator Leo Jaramillo (left), Governor Michelle Lujan

News

All New Mexico students will spend more time in class beginning next school year, and some could spend additional days learning as well, under a bill passed 34-6 Tuesday by the State Senate.

The bill now heads to the desk of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham for her signature.

House Bill 130 increases the number of hours elementary students spend in school each year to a minimum of 1,140 from 990, and boosts middle and high school hours to that same level from the current 1,080.

Included in the instructional hours are up to 60 hours of professional work time per year for elementary teachers, and up to 30 hours for middle and high school teachers. 

Legislators said they hoped the additional time would help propel New Mexico out of its last-place ranking nationally in educational performance.

On top of the mandatory increase in instructional hours, the bill incentivizes school districts to increase their number of instructional days by offering a multiplier for exceeding 180 days, and a higher multiplier for exceeding190 days.

That flexibility appealed to lawmakers, who said local control is a cornerstone of New Mexico public education.

“One size doesn’t fit all,” said State Sen Nancy Rodriguez, a Santa Fe Democrat during a March 12 Senate Finance Committee hearing on the bill. “School districts have requested over and over to have flexibility to adapt their districts and their form of education according to their individual needs. And this bill does that and much more.”

Lawmakers also said they appreciated that the bill mandates extra hours rather than days, giving districts that choose four-day weeks an option to keep that schedule in place.

State Sen. Crystal Diamond, an Elephant Butte Republican, said rural schools are facing learning challenges just as acute as more urban areas. “And so when we push back on trying to extend hours or trying to extend days, it defies common sense,” Diamond said. 

“Often in my area you hear “we had summers off because we’d go back and work the farms or cattle ranch. We have a full working cattle ranch. And I can assure you that my girls are not the top top staff there. We can do without them and their middle school buddies.”

The new requirements will be funded in part by the termination of two optional extended learning time programs that were under-utilized by school districts. The annual cost of the new requirements would be $252 million, according to new budget documents.

All New Mexico students will spend more

News

New Mexico voters are likely to be asked to vote in 2024 on a constitutional amendment that would remove the Public Education Department from gubernatorial control and move it under an elected board.

Proponents of Senate Joint Resolution 1 said in various legislative hearings over the past two weeks that high turnover at the top of the PED in recent years has led to instability, hurting the quality of the state’s education system. They expressed the belief that having an independent, elected board hire the state’s top education official to run the PED would stop the revolving door and allow the department to set a steady course.

Opponents countered that removing public education, which consumes 45 percent of the state budget, from gubernatorial control would diminish accountability and result in worse outcomes for kids.

SJR 1 passed the State Senate March 1 on a 36-1 vote. It passed the House Education Committee earlier this week on a 9-2 vote, and needs only full House approval to be sent to the voters. 

A statewide vote of the people on the constitutional amendment would be held in 2024. If passed, the amendment would create a state school board that would set education policy and appoint a superintendent of public instruction to manage the PED.

The state school board would be composed of 15 members, 10 elected and five state officers appointed by the governor, for staggered terms of six years.

Public education operated independently from the executive branch until 2003, when then Governor Bill Richardson shepherded passage of a constitutional amendment creating the Public Education Department and the position of education secretary. Advocates for the change at the time said that the state board was too often deadlocked and education policy was slow to adapt to the times and change course when needed.

Senate President Pro Tem Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, the legislation’s co-sponsor, argued that the amendment would help remove politics from the state’s public education apparatus. 

“Every either four or eight years the education community basically gets whiplash because things change so drastically, with a new administration and a new secretary.,” Stewart said during a Senate committee hearing on the bill. “That did not happen when we had a partly elected, partly appointed state school board.”

During the House Education Committee hearing, NewMexicoKidsCAN Executive Director Amanda Aragon said an elected board would not reduce politicization of the state’s education system.

“We agree that politics should be out of education, but running 10 elections across the state of New Mexico will…follow what we’ve seen in school board elections across the state and across the country that have become more political, more ugly and caused more chaos at the local level,” Aragon said. “We don’t believe doing that at the state level is the best way to remove politics from education.”

State Rep. Susan Herrera, A Democrat who represents Rio Arriba, Santa Fe and Taos, said instability is more of a problem at the local than the state level. “Leadership matters and stability matters, but I think it matters more at the local level, frankly, than it does at the top,” Herrera said. “Our big problem is the huge turnover of superintendents and school boards.”

Colorado has had an elected state board of education and  board-appointed education commissioner for several decades. “The obvious advantage of having the governor appoint the commissioner is that the single biggest item in the state budget is education, somewhere around 40 percent,” said Van Schoales, a long-time educator and advocate, who currently serves as senior policy director at the Denver-based Keystone Policy Center. “It makes sense for the governor to have some control over that.”

Schoales also said a 15-member state board of education is problematic, in part because a body that large can have a hard time making decisions, and in part because voter engagement in such elections is often extremely low.”

In theory, he concluded, it makes sense to have the governor appoint the state’s top education official, “but it depends who the governor is.” He said former Governor Susana Martinez “wanted to change the system and therefore had a very strong, reform-oriented secretary,” but that current Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham “doesn’t seem interested in reforming the system.”

‘So it’s kind of a mixed bag,” Schoales said.

New Mexico voters are likely to be

News

SANTA FE– A bill that would limit the expansion of charter schools in parts of New Mexico was tabled by the Senate Education Committee on February 24. 

The bill would prohibit the opening of new charters in school districts where charters already have a significant presence.

The near unanimous vote came after debate about parents’ right to choose where their child attends school.

Sponsored by Senator Mimi Stewart (D – Bernalillo) and Representative Tara L. Lujan (D – Santa Fe), Senate Bill 422 would have stopped new charter schools from opening in school districts where 10 percent of the district’s students are enrolled in charters. 

.According to Stewart, 10 of the 89 school districts in New Mexico would be affected by this bill.

Stewart said the bill was not an attempt to eliminate charter schools. She said that the bill would not cause the closure of any existing charter. Rather, she said, the bill was designed to level the playing field so that public schools could remain competitive and not have to shut down as the popularity of charter schools rises. 

This statement was met with mixed reaction from a gallery filled with people mostly opposed to the bill.

Committee Chairman William Soules (D – Doña Ana) asked the audience for those in support of the bill to raise their hands, and four hands went up. When he asked for those in opposition to raise their hands, so many hands went up the chairman asked for only “six or seven” opposition members to speak to save time.

Richard Romero, a lobbyist for Excellent Schools New Mexico, was the first to speak in opposition to the bill.  He expressed concern that limiting the expansion of charter schools would strip families of the right to choose the best place for their children’s education.

Matt Pahl, executive director of Public Charter Schools of New Mexico, said that district-run  public schools need to do more if they don’t want charters opening in their districts, rather than pushing a bill in the state legislature. 

“If school districts don’t want charter schools, they need to build schools and programs that are what families want,” he said. “This is a bad bill.”

Pahl’s sentiment was shared by the next several speakers, including the Executive Director of El Camino Rael Academy in Albuquerque; and Steve Carillo, a current New Mexico Public Education Commissioner.

Far fewer speakers supported  SB422.

One supporter was Superintendent of Santa Fe Public Schools Hilario “Larry” Chavez. He expressed concern that charter schools are limiting the abilities of public schools to do their jobs, with 25 percent of the student population in Santa Fe attending charters, and more attending private schools. 

Chavez said that charters are supposed to be providing an innovative way to educate, but are instead following the same path as traditional public schools. Many teachers in the district are worried about losing their jobs because district-run schools are losing students to charters.

Others speaking in favor of the bill included representatives from Las Cruces Public Schools, and the National Education Association – New Mexico, who also said that they were concerned about the way funds can be diverted from the classroom to executive salaries.

Senator Craig Brandt (R – Sandoval) expressed concern that this bill would limit parents’ choice for their children’s education. He said  his children attend public, charter, and private schools, and that his family appreciated the ability to choose what was ideal for each child “I believe that parents are the best [people] to decide where their children [can receive] the best education.”

Senator Gay Kernan (R – Chavez, Eddy, Lea) said she was most concerned about charter schools that serve students virtually. She asked whether students would be counted in the school district where they reside, or where the school is headquartered. 

Soules was the only member of the committee to vote “No” on the motion, which was tabled on a 7-1 vote.

The bill would prohibit the opening of

Commentary

Editor’s note: This article was written by Lina Germann, a New Mexico citizen, parent, and educator,

House Bill 126, which would reduce New Mexico high school graduation requirements, passed the State House of Representatives Wednesday, with an overwhelming 64-3 vote. It has passed two State Senate committees as well, and awaits a vote on the Senate floor.

While amendments made the bill slightly more palatable, it remains deeply flawed and will cause long-term damage if signed into law.

Among its most troubling elements, the bill would remove Algebra II as a graduation requirement. Algebra II is important for brain development. The course builds problem-solving capacity and resilience. Though there was an amendment adopted on the floor that requires schools to offer the course, it is no longer required for graduation.

Removing Algebra II as a graduation requirement is problematic because it limits the options of students who choose not to take the course. Many colleges and universities require applicants to have taken Algebra II. Not requiring it amounts to a self-sorting mechanism that ensures some students will not be college-eligible.

Have the sponsors of this bill looked into what higher education institutions in and out of state require for admission? I am speaking as a parent whose one son graduated top of his class at a public high school in NM and still needed remedial math. My other son and his friend discovered after the fact in their senior year that three years of a foreign language is required at the college of his choice. Fortunately, he had fulfilled that requirement. His friend wasn’t as fortunate.

The bill requires all middle schools to put a four-year plan in place for their students as they finish 8th grade. However, most high school counseling departments are already understaffed and overburdened with very limited capacity to work with each student on ‘next-step plans’ each year. It is unrealistic to expect guidance counselors, who are assigned large numbers of students, to keep track of all their students so closely, to make sure that students are fulfilling the requirements for their desired pathway, or to even be aware of all the higher education requirements in and out of state, let alone CTE tracks and their requirements. 

What if a student who initially isn’t focused on college decides part way through high school that he or she wants to enroll after all, do these new requirements set them up for success in changing their minds, which we know many high school students do? 

Without a doubt, the bill, if it becomes law, would track more students out of high school into the trades. While the trades provide many good jobs with liveable wages, high schools should be encouraging all of their students to aim as high as possible and not to close themselves off to the possibility of attending college. New Mexico students should be college-ready whether they choose that track or not.

New Mexico’s current graduation requirements are not the main problem facing the state’s education system. The problem is in a failing system that needs overhauling from the ground up.

While amendments made House Bill 126 slightly

Commentary

Editor’s note: This article which first appeared in Tumbleweeds Magazine, was written by Christopher Eide Azevedo, head administrator at Turquoise Trail Charter School, the top ranked charter school in New Mexico and a multiyear Best of Santa Fe recipient. Contact him at ceide@ttschool.org.

As the pandemic lockdown year was coming to a close, hundreds of families from Turquoise Trail Charter School continued to meet online, as we had become accustomed to, every full moon. At the meeting on the full moon in April, I asked how many families would be interested in an online option for the upcoming school year, 2021-22. Within 36 hours we had 101 names on the list, and thus we decided to create a new school, which would exist primarily online, called the Academy of Extraordinary Circumstance. It would feature its own dedicated staff and administration, and as a state charter, we had the latitude to serve students from all over the state. 

The Academy still exists, albeit with a smaller student population, serving students who live far away or nearby, are hospital bound, or who have gotten in trouble and are unable to be with us in person. It was this group that, despite being primarily virtual, did something real and lasting that will benefit younger students for decades to come.

In a rare event, on Tuesday, January 10, students from the Academy took advantage of the days before the chaos of the legislative session to present their plans for an update to the school’s playground at the Roundhouse in a request for capital outlay funds. 

Starting last fall, the students researched public spaces and how they are used in order to develop a comprehensive plan for a new playground at our rural south Santa Fe school. They used 3-D modeling technology to create designs, voted on their favorite, then got to work on the challenging work of feasibility and likelihood. I gave them a budget goal of $100,000 for their project. One team got to work fine tuning the winning design and making it more lifelike on a version of CAD software. Another group built budgets in consultation with playground design companies. And a third interviewed students and teachers at the school in order to build a case for the playground and its eventual final design. A group of five came to the school to represent their peers in a presentation to myself, selected staff, and our lobbyist. They took the feedback and made edits, and came back a few weeks later to present to a new audience, including an official from the Legislative Finance Committee, who gave another round of feedback.

We requested a meeting with legislators representing the vast area that our school draws students from, and Senator Elizabeth Stefanics graciously set up a meeting in an official committee hearing room, alongside four other representatives and senators. The students sat at the presentation table in their finest dress, having rehearsed everything down to their handshakes, and began. They came prepared with copies of their report and a slide deck outlining the need for the project and the request. They fielded questions from the distinguished panel, taking care to remember to address the chair in their responses. When it was over, Senator Leo Jaramillo, a former teacher who heard about what was happening and came over to take part, said to the students: “I don’t know what I was doing in seventh and eighth grade, but it wasn’t that.” 

In the end, the students requested $250,000 to support a new playground on campus at Turquoise Trail, which would leave a powerful legacy. Their designs took care to ensure accessibility for those with disabilities, and paid attention to which plants would create a more joyful outdoor experience and the irrigation systems that would be required in order to support them. In addition, they designed a solar-powered drinking fountain and bottle filling station. 

Creating something lasting for those who will follow them was a powerful motivator for the students. “As someone who has been at the school for 10 years, I feel excited to work on something that I will be able to leave behind,” said Selah Montoya, a student who presented the project. 

Their 27-page report to the five legislators present in the committee hearing room not only laid out their CAD-based renderings, associated budgets, and report with in-text citations, but set an example for what transparency in capital outlay funding could look like. 

In 2021, representatives sponsored House Bill 55, underlining the importance of ensuring that the public has access to where capital outlay funds are allocated. These funds, which are designed to provide critical assistance for capital projects and improvements, are often negotiated behind closed doors between legislators and lobbyists. When the end users of the capital funds are able to make concise requests and monitor the eventual implementation of the works being funded, however, the process becomes more participatory and, therefore, more transparent. 

Leave it to students to lead the way. “Throughout the entirety of this project, each and every student of the ‘Academy of Extraordinary Circumstance’ at TTCS showed an incredible amount of determination to achieve a unified goal of being prepared to stand in front of government officials at The Roundhouse”, said Bruce Jameson, teacher leader at Turquoise Trail. “I am truly proud of every student and their strong belief that even though they are middle school students, they can still make an incredible difference in this world.”

Capital outlay requests are dependent on what legislators themselves deem to be important to communities, and who they choose to listen to is the first signal of their values. In particular, those present from the New Mexico State Legislature modeled for the students what leadership for young people can look like. We would like to thank Senators Stefanics and Jaramillo as well as Representatives Matthew McQueen, Linda Serrato, and Chrisine Chandler for honoring the students with their presence, consideration, and thoughtful questions. The students were treated as professionals, though after the meeting ended, they became giddy young people again, asking me whether we could stop for ice cream on the way back to school. 

We did.

Starting last fall, the students researched public