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Jade Rivera, founder and executive director of Albuquerque Collegiate Charter School, doesn’t hesitate for even a beat when asked how New Mexico’s Extended Learning Time Program has benefited her school.

With the majority of Albuquerque Collegiate students entering school already lagging in basic academic skills, every hour and every day of school is precious, Rivera said. The state’s Extended Learning Time Program funds an additional 10 days of school per year for all students. That can make a big difference.

Still, according to a report from the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee, 43 of the state’s 89 school districts “elected not to participate in any sort of extended school year” during the 2021-22 academic year.

That’s puzzling to leaders like Rivera. “More time means more learning for scholars,” Rivera said recently. “We want that learning to be really impactful and targeted to their individual needs.” 

The school, now in its fourth year, currently serves 160 kindergarten through fourth-graders. It will expand to fifth grade next year.

Despite the learning challenges the Covid-19 pandemic brought to schools across the country, Albuquerque Collegiate is seeing signs that its extended day is paying dividends. Although comprehensive data is hard to come by since the state paused its standardized testing in 2020 and 2021, local information through the Istation formative assessments the school administered last fall show that Albuquerque Collegiate students are making solid gains.

“We are seeing significant rates of reading proficiency at least two times that of the local district and state that we attribute certainly to the overall academic program, but also to this extra time for learning which we see as core to our overall academic program,” Rivera said.

Statewide, mid-year Istation data for K-4 in the 2021-22 school year showed that just a quarter of students tested were reading proficiently. At Albuquerque Collegiate, 55 percent of students were proficient. That doesn’t satisfy Rivera, but it tells her the school is recovering more effectively from the pandemic than are many other schools.

“It (55 percent) is definitely not where we want it to be. Our goal is to get closer to the 80 percent range for our scholars by end of year,” she said. “But we also recognize the really deep impacts of learning loss over the last two years for students.”

Albuquerque Collegiate’s academic day is significantly longer than a regular elementary school in Albuquerque Public Schools, running from 7:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. – just under eight hours, compared to six hours per day for most APS elementary schools. 

The $80,000 in ELTP funds the school received this year also allows Albuquerque Collegiate to offer a free after school care program to all of its students, free of charge. This is a tremendous boon to working-class parents, who often lack the work-hour flexibility to pick their children up from school in the middle of the afternoon, when most public elementary schools dismiss.

Between the ELTP and the after-school program, Albuquerque Collegiate students can be in school from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., five days per week.

While those after-school hours are vitally important to parents, it’s the extra academic time that has made a difference for students. In grades K-2, Rivera said, about 40 percent of school days are spent on “foundational literacy instruction.” Making sure students can read on grade level by the end of third grade sets them up for success in later grades, when they will be “reading to learn” instead of learning to read, she said.

“You can’t pick up a science book and gather content if you don’t have foundational literacy skills in place, Rivera said. “It’s really important to us that we have those solid foundational literacy skills in K-2, so that our students in third through fifth grade are able to dive more deeply and more meaningfully into their other content areas.”

If the state didn’t offer the ELTP, Rivera said, “we would still run our same calendar – it’s that important.” But this would require sacrifices elsewhere in the school’s budget. “We’re able to keep more dollars in our classrooms, and provide the supports that our teachers and scholars need to be successful. Having this additional time is critical to that success.”

Younger students, whose early primary years have been hit hard by the pandemic, are especially in need of the extra time, Rivera said. This year’s second-graders experienced multiple disruptions to their first-grade year. So Albuquerque Collegiate is using its extra hours and days to backfill first grade standards while simultaneously working to keep those second-graders doing their grade-level work.

Rivera, an Albuqueruqe native, founded Albuquerque Collegiate after serving as a Teach for America Corps Member. She returned to New Mexico to work in the Public Education Department during the administration of Gov. Susana Martinez. She then completed a rigorous Building Excellent Schools fellowship. That program prepares young educators to open high-performing charter schools.

Despite the learning challenges the Covid-19 pandemic

Quick Hits

The New Mexico House of Representatives voted 64-0 Feb.10 to pass  House Bill 43, which would take several steps to ease the facility funding burden on charter schools.

The bill now moves to the Senate Education Committee, and if it passes there, to the Senate floor. Time is of the essence because the 30-day legislative session ends on Thursday at noon.

If passed through both houses of the state legislature and signed into law, the bill would:

  • Create a $10 million Charter School Facility Revolving Fund. The fund would not be used for construction but would be available for schools currently in lease purchase agreements to use for refinancing. Only charter schools that are established and have been renewed at least once would be eligible to tap the fund.
  • Ensure that available public land and facilities not used by school districts would be offered to charter schools. This provision would be enforced by the Public Schools Facilities Authority.
  • Standardize what is currently a $700 per student lease assistance payment for charter schools. The amount of lease assistance charters currently receive is unpredictable because it is allocated based on the square footage of instructional space in schools, as measured by the Public School Capital Outlay Council.
  • Help charter schools get onto school district bond funding elections and distributions.

A similar bill last year died in committee, but its prospects appear brighter this year.

The New Mexico House of Representatives voted

News

When Kimberly Finke became principal of Albuquerque’s Whittier Elementary School in 2019, she brought with her a wealth of experience successfully turning around other struggling schools in Gallup and Albuquerque.

Whittier has been no different. Despite the enormous speed bump that is Covid-19, Whittier has made enormous progress under Finke’s leadership. When she arrived as a result of interventions required by New Mexico’s implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), many Whittier students were two or more grade levels behind in reading. In the first couple of years, more than half of those students were on pace to catch up within another year. Then Covid hit with “devastating” effects, Finke said.

As the pandemic recedes, Whittier is picking up steam again, because the systems Finke established are strong and her staff now has experience in turning things around. 

New Mexico Education interviewed Finke to learn her turnaround secrets, and to examine with her whether large-scale turnaround is possible, and, if so, what are the necessary elements of a successful turnaround strategy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

New Mexico Education: Let’s start with a bit about your background turning around schools before Whittier.

Kimberly Finke: I started my career in Gallup. I learned about school turnaround there by doing two school turnarounds. The first was Jefferson Elementary, where Wilhelmina Yazzie (a lead plaintiff in the Yazzie-Martinez education adequacy lawsuit) was one of my parents, and then at Gallup High.I came to Albuquerque Public Schools six years ago. I was at Corrales Elementary School for two short years, and we went from an F rating to a B in that time.

Then in 2019 the district asked me to come down to Whittier, because the state had come down and named three APS schools, including Whittier, as the worst schools in the state and they were threatening shutdown. We had to come up with plans to basically convince the state that our schools were worth keeping open.

I’m a big believer in neighborhood schools. I firmly believe that neighborhood schools are still the best option for most parents in public education. Not everybody has the ability to go out shopping for schools, there are transportation concerns, all that kind of thing. So I think we’re  obligated to provide great neighborhood schools for our kids.

NME: What are the basic components of your turnaround strategy at Whittier?

Finke: The first one is an extended school year. We extended the school year by 10 days as part of the turnaround. [This was before the Extended Learning Time Program was created and funded for every school that wants to participate, and perhaps it even inspired it.] We pushed for the program so we could get consistent funding for it. My teachers know there are 10 extra days on the contract.

We also extended the school day. So my kids get an extra 45 minutes of school each day. And instead of having that be more interventions, we have something called Genius Hour. It’s enrichment.

Why do we do this? Well, if you grow up in my household, I have the means to provide horseback riding lessons or swimming lessons or coding or tutoring or whatever I need to for my kids. It’s just part of being a middle class family. But a lot of our families can’t provide that for their kids. So we do it here at school.

The last 45 minutes of the day, they get basketball or archery or cooking class or comics, drama, string art, ukulele, sign language. The kids come up with the ideas. They particularly love the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) offerings. We have different rotations so they get to try out four or five new things a year.

And they all tie somehow into academics as well. With chess, there are aspects of math and coding. When I’m learning to cook, I’m actually applying my fractions. And there are huge social-emotional aspects of having that enrichment as well.

These are the experiences that we want to make sure every kid gets. We feel it’s an equity issue. Because those are the types of experiences that really make learning meaningful.

Teachers have a longer day as well. They work an eight-and-a-half hour day here (compared to the standard 6.5 hour contract utilized by most APS schools). We have professional development every morning. We’ll learn about something one day, and then we have a chance to go practice it. We sit down and write plans, and set up centers where teachers can come for help. I describe it as job-embedded professional development.

In education, so often it’s just drive-by professional development. Teachers have that feeling well, if I just had time to put that together. That would be such a cool thing to do. So we have the time to put it together. We learn about it. And then we do it.

NME: How have you worked with the teachers union to get them to go along with these longer days and years?

Finke: The union had an interest in not seeing a neighborhood school get shut down. So they showed a really high degree of flexibility in allowing us to negotiate those things for teachers. The union has really backed trying to get legislation written to allow these programs to be adopted by other schools.

NME: Do your teachers get extra pay for the additional days and hours they put in?

Finke: They do get about a $13,000 bump in pay. But I’m not gonna lie. It’s hard. It’s not like people are just getting handed all this extra cash. They work very hard.

NME: How would you describe the neighborhood and conditions where Whittier is located?

Finke: Based on the 2010 census, this neighborhood has the highest rates of child poverty and food insecurity in New Mexico. Our children are far more likely to be raised by mothers without a high school diploma. They are more likely to be reported for child abuse or neglect, far more likely to be referred to the juvenile justice system. So it’s a neighborhood that needs more.

We have about 40 families right now on the verge of homelessness just because of what’s going on with the landlords and rents in this area. I have a family that just enrolled that was living in their car for a year but then their car got stolen, so now they’re doubling up with friends.

NME: How would you say all of this is reflected in academic challenges facing these kids?

Finke: The first year I was here, we dug through data. New Mexico tracks cohorts of kids, and what I learned was that only 48 percent of Whittier kids graduate on time from high school. So we are trying to turn that statistic by making sure that they’re going off to middle school with appropriate reading skills, that they can write, that they can do the mathematics they need to do to get through algebra, because that’s the gateway class for high school.

NME: As you dig out from the impacts of the pandemic, what gives you hope?

Finke: Before the pandemic, our kids were getting almost a year-and-a-half of growth in a year. The pandemic hit and it has been devastating. And I have to say online kindergarten is maybe the dumbest thing that has ever been thought up in the world.

But we can do it again. We know what to do. We’ve already done it once here. There’s not that sense of panic about it. Our collective attitude is OK, we’ve got this. We got this. We know how to talk to parents. We know how to involve them. We know how to set up interventions. None of these systems were in place when we started. There were no intervention systems. There were not even testing and assessment systems, So we didn’t really even know how our kids were doing. I’m a strong believer in data: you always have to go back to the data.

NME: Everything you say about how you’ve turned around schools makes so much sense, it begs the question: Why don’t more schools do it?

Finke: It takes more money, but even more important, it involves changing people’s belief systems. It’s getting people to change their mindsets and understand they’re our kids.If they’re going to have the same outcome as everybody else – they’re going to graduate, they’re going to go to college or the military or trade school –  then they need more. They need more everything. 

They need more time. They need more love. They need teachers with more experience and more training. They need more time on task, they need more enrichment. They just need more. And that’s okay. That’s absolutely OK.

NME: Does it take special teachers and a special leader to make this happen

Finke: I call it love the one you’re with. How do you work with the teachers? There’s a lot of teacher blaming. When a school is failing, it’s always “they’re bad teachers.” Well, guess what? We don’t have a lot of teachers. There was a giant shortage before and now it’s just epic. You have to love the one you’re with. You have to figure out how to develop who you have.

When Kimberly Finke became principal of Albuquerque’s

Commentary

Editor’s note: This article was written by Kelsey McCaffrey, an Intervention Teacher and Coach at Albuquerque Collegiate Charter School, Albuquerque

Thursdays are our kindergarteners’ favorite days of the week.

Not because they usually serve spaghetti for lunch or that it is almost the weekend, but because it is trash day. As we go to recess I always feel a bubbling up of energy when the children catch sight of the big green truck clanging against the bins. 

However, every Thursday for me is a painful reminder of the loading dock we have transformed into a playground. There are days I pretend not to smell the trash bins in hopes that it will convince the students the horrid smell of old milk doesn’t exist. 

When delivery trucks pass through the narrow space between our playground and the neighboring Family Dollar, they pollute the air with such noise that I struggle to raise my voice to be louder than their screeching. 

The industrial environment that exists behind our school is a dire reminder of the reality many charter schools face today when funding their facilities. Our charter school, Albuquerque Collegiate Charter (ACCS), which sits between a Family Dollar and an indoor mercado in a shopping center, is not alone in this. 

Similarly, New Mexico International School (NMIS) has been utilizing the nearby park as the school’s next option for an outdoor space. With those park trips came a slew of insurance barriers, proper recess staffing and neighborhood complaints. While International School waits on the lengthy process of bidding and the coverage of expenses for building a playground, students have been playing in a parking lot. This large asphalt slab with slippery, loose gravel and a single portable basketball hoop has seen too many badly-skinned knees since 2019. 

Charter school students deserve better. 

As a teacher, I know my students deserve to arrive at a school facility that reflects the value we see in each and every one of them. Charter schools have established that they can excel and create life-changing trajectories for students, yet continue to struggle with funds for facilities. Public charter schools receive substantially less facility funding than traditional public schools.  Their primary mechanism to pay for facilities, the Lease Assistance program, provides on average only 50% of the funding needed to pay their leases. 

The facility funding for charter schools doesn’t allow for financing long-term homes for our schools and is not adjusted to meet the needs of growing, successful schools like ACCS. We continue to grow in size, yet we are only allocated funds for the students we enrolled the previous year. 

Parents in search of a school that creates a pathway to college have to look past the pigeons and faded parking lines to see a school with these high expectations. Now, our need for facility funding might finally have support in a bipartisan effort through House Bill 43, which would ease the process of leasing, constructing and purchasing a building for new and seeking-to-expand public charter schools.

As charter schools continue to experience a demand for growth, ACCS has brought in the surrounding South Valley community in a unique way. Two of our scholars bring the most delicious lunches everyday from their family’s restaurant in the shopping center, a frequent lunch location for our staff. 

The Family Dollar to our left donated hundreds of balloons to scholars for Valentine’s Day this last year. Our shopping center has become a community center for so many families at our school. 

Our students deserve a building that reflects the value we put into their own education. To remedy this, I hope our legislature will pass House Bill 43 which will help ensure our students have the facilities to best support their education. 

Editor's note: This article was written by Kelsey

News

When the Covid-19 pandemic lingered through the fall of 2020 and public schools across New Mexico remained closed, Chris Eide Azevedo, head administrator at Santa Fe’s Turquoise Trail Charter School found himself inundated with questions and concerns from his school community.

“During the shutdown, communicating was a struggle,” Eide Azevedo said recently. “I had a deep fear of getting caught in a game of telephone from which we’d never recover. Information from the state was sparse, and that was challenging as well.”

So rather than dispensing limited information in an endless series of one-on-one conversations, Eide Azevedo decided to take a very pandemic-era approach: He started a podcast.

“The Hypothesis” launched on September 29, 2020. Eide Azevedo produced 20 episodes, concluding last December 14. Most of the episodes ran for 10-15 minutes, and only one topped the 30-minute mark. They’re well worth a listen, for the historical record among other reasons.

In the introduction to each episode, Eide Azevedo describes the podcast’s theme as “what it’s like behind closed doors, making decisions about whether or not to open up school in the middle of a global pandemic.”

Initially, Eide Azevedo’s target audience was the Turquoise Trail community. But as word spread, he gained listeners from across New Mexico and, eventually, the country. ‘The Hypothesis’ provides a fascinating, at times granular look at one school’s struggles to cope with the multitude of challenges poised by Covid-19.

“I thought producing a podcast would be more compelling for the community than sending out emails or memos telling everyone ‘here is what’s happening,’” Eide Azevedo said. It also provided an opportunity to explain to the community in detail how much thought had to go into every logistical decision.

One 12-minute episode, “The Math of a Classroom,” provides a sterling example. It focuses on what goes into configuring a classroom to prevent the spread of Covid. “It’s not as simple as just doing the square footage measurement of a classroom and creating six-foot circles and letting that be the guide how many students can fit in a room. No it’s actually much more complex if your goal is truly to keep kids safe,” Eide Azevedo says early in the episode.

To fit 16 students in a classroom with six feet of separation, all furniture other than individual student desks – including bookshelves – would have to be removed. But it gets even more layered from there. 

Danielle Garcia, the school’s director of operations, explains in the episode that it isn’t just how kids fit in the classroom. It’s also how they move around the classroom, and the interactions they have with teachers and other students. These considerations are especially complex with the youngest students.

In that case, Eide Azevedo explained, perhaps only 10 kids can fit safely in a classroom. So what to do with a class of 16? Go hybrid? Use hallways as additional classrooms to accommodate more kids?

Parents don’t usually have access to this level of thoughtful conversation and decision-making within a school. The podcast proved to be a brilliant communication tool.

That Eide Azevedo came up with the concept isn’t surprising, given his lifelong passion for solving the puzzles of public education. 

He started a cross-age tutoring program for middle school kids when he was in high school. He participated in seven different service learning projects in college. And when he graduated, he became an early Teach for America corps member in Houston, where he “fell in love with teaching and school.”

While in TFA, Eide Azevedo began pondering some of the deeper challenges that have long plagued public education. Why does demography so often seem to be destiny? Yet why, in some rare instances, do schools buck that trend, delivering stellar results while schools with similar student demographics struggle?

In Houston, those questions led him to the original KIPP charter middle school, where low-income students of color, so consistently ill-served by traditional public schools, seemed to be thriving. “I became obsessed with KIPP,” he said. “I took personal days to spend time there.”

After he finished his two years of TFA service, Eide Azevedo moved to Harlem to become a founding seventh-grade math teacher at a KIPP school there. Ultimately, he wanted to move home to Seattle to start a KIPP or KIPP-like school.

But charter schools were illegal in Washington at the time, so Eide Azevedo decided to dive into the murky waters of education policy and politics. He earned a master’s degree in education policy from Harvard University, then took a job at the University of Washington’s influential Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Eventually he migrated back to the classroom, and taught at a high-poverty school in Seattle. While teaching, he began recruiting teachers into an organization interested in promoting the professionalization of teaching. That eventually became a statewide advocacy group known as Teachers United, which, with a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, helped get charter school legislation passed in Washington.

Next, Eide Azevedo led movements of teachers in states across the country for better policies for young people from low-income families as National Director for Teach Plus. In 2017, that work brought him to New Mexico, where he became director of educator quality at Gov. Susana Martinez’s Public Education Department.

But it was always his goal to return to a school, and when the opportunity arose to assume the helm at Turquoise Trail, New Mexico’s longest standing charter school, he jumped at it.

“It’s just such a unique, amazing community,” Eide Azevedo said of the pre-K-8 school, founded in 1994. “It has evolved over time from this ragtag start-up on the dusty plains at the edge of town to a school that serves almost 10 percent of Santa Fe’s public school students.”

Turquoise Trail’s student body is racially, socioeconomically, and culturally diverse. Eide Azevedo said students range from the children of senators to kids who come out of local artist colonies to first-generation U.S. residents.

To help cope with the pandemic, Turquoise Trail launched a fully virtual school at the beginning of this school year. “The Academy of Extraordinary Circumstance” is serving 80 students in grades 5 through 8, with a group of “ninja teachers” leading the way. It’s likely to continue after this year, albeit in an even more efficient and dynamic way.

The school will thrive in the post-pandemic era, Eide Azevedo said. “It is a beloved place, a crown jewel.  We’re on the precipice of amazing things” as restrictions begin to lift.

When the Covid-19 pandemic lingered through the

Quick Hits

House Bill 43, which would take several steps to ease the facility funding burden on charter schools, passed unanimously out of the New Mexico House of Representatives Education Committee on Friday.

If passed through both houses of the state legislature and signed into law, the bill would:

  • Create a $10 million Charter School Facility Revolving Fund. The fund would not be used for construction but would be available for schools currently in lease purchase agreements to use for refinancing. Only charter schools that are established and have been renewed at least once would be eligible to tap the fund.
  • Ensure that available public land and facilities not used by school districts would be offered to charter schools. This provision would be enforced by the Public Schools Facilities Authority.
  • Standardize what is currently a $700 per student lease assistance payment for charter schools. The amount of lease assistance charters currently receive is unpredictable because it is allocated based on the square footage of instructional space in schools, as measured by the Public School Capital Outlay Council.
  • Help charter schools get onto school district bond funding elections and distributions.

A similar bill last year died in committee, but proponents are optimistic it will gain better traction this year.

Matt Pahl, executive director of Public Charter Schools of New Mexico, said the loan fund would “allow charter schools as public institutions to get public funding for their facilities, whereas now they need to go to the private bond market or to other states’ bonding authorities.”

The bill garnered strong support from people speaking during public comment as well as from members of the committee.

It now moves onto the House Appropriations and Finance Committee and, if it passes there, a floor vote.

House Bill 43, which would take several

Quick Hits

Kurt Steinhaus, the former superintendent of Los Alamos Public Schools, was easily confirmed as the New Mexico Secretary of Education Wednesday by the state Senate. He has been serving as secretary-designate since last summer.

Former colleagues spoke glowingly of Steinhaus during a hearing earlier Wednesday before the Senate Rules Committee.  “He is accessible. He’s a man of integrity. He’s a man of vision, and most importantly…he is a man who is not afraid to interact and talk about the real issues we have in New Mexico schools,” said Stan Rounds, executive director of the New Mexico Superintendents Association.

“He has been one of us. He is a school superintendent and we still count him among our ranks.” 

Even the four Republicans who voted against him said it was less about his qualifications than the policies of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, and the fact that he is the third education secretary since Lujan Grisham took office in 2019.

During his testimony before the rules committee, Steinhaus stressed that he believes teacher evaluation is “absolutely essential to running our schools.” But under his watch, the state suspended teacher evaluations for a third consecutive year.

Steinhaus also pledged that his Public Education Department will administer statewide standardized tests before the end of the school year. Testing, too, has been suspended during the past two years of pandemic disruptions.

See this article from the Santa Fe New Mexican for a more detailed account of the confirmation.

Kurt Steinhaus, the former superintendent of Los

Commentary

Editor’s note: This article was written by Amanda Aragon, Executive Director of NewMexicoKidsCAN. Amanda is a product of New Mexico public schools and was the first in her family to graduate from college. 

If four years ago, we had asked ourselves, “what could we do if we invested an additional $3,000 per student into our education budget” I wonder what we would have imagined?

Some ideas that are currently being explored would have arisen; higher teacher salaries, more funds for at-risk students, more counselors, more extended learning time Suggestions for more. 

Though, based on my conversations with New Mexicans across the state I also imagine we would have heard calls for not just more, but for something different, for something better. 

I’ve heard suggestions ranging from money to families to support their students’ individual needs, whether that is tutoring or a summer learning program; personalized professional development programs for educators rooted in systemic changes to district instruction that will yield student learning results; and revised school calendars that embed activities so that every student has access to sports and clubs, not just those who have transportation. 

Maybe in 2018 the idea that we could invest an additional $3,000 per student was unimaginable, so we did not imagine it. We simply moved forward. Now we find ourselves at a place we never imagined – we have invested more in education, a lot more. In other words, we have done exactly what the unimaginable was. We have added $1.1 billion to the New Mexico education budget over the past five years, equaling approximately $3,030 per student. 

Spending for New Mexico’s K-12 system has increased by a third, from $2.69 billion in FY18 to a proposed $3.8 billion this year, even as student enrollment has declined by 20,000 students from its pre-pandemic high in 2018-19.

And, none of these numbers include the $1.5 billion dollars in federal funding our schools have received through federal stimulus. If you include those funds, we are actually closer to $7,500 in additional investment per student. 

This investment was important. Most New Mexicans agree there is nothing more important than our students – they are our future. However, we must have a more honest conversation about what we have to show for this increased spending and whether that money is being spent wisely, and as intended.

Due at least in part to Covid-19, we are flying blind as a state. There has been no standardized test data since 2019 to show whether the increased investment has led to improvements in student learning. Though the Public Education Department  is preparing to run our annual assessment this spring, we are unlikely to see the results of that assessment until late summer or early fall, long past the time our legislators have appropriated funding for next year.  

Also, the assessment our students will take this year is new and will be difficult to compare to prior results, making the data more challenging to interpret and use for budgeting decisions. 

If anything, piecemeal data we do have shows that New Mexico students, like students in other states across the country, have suffered significant setbacks in their learning because of pandemic-related disruptions to in-person schooling.

But there’s more missing than achievement data. The legislature passed a law two years ago mandating creation of a website that will display detailed, school-level budget data, and allocated $3 million to fund the effort.

That site was supposed to go live last December 31 but didn’t. After concerns were raised, a site was published but it does not comply with the intent of the law to share information about school level budgets, it only shares district level spending data. Unfortunately, this means our legislators still have no access to data to understand if their appropriations are actually benefiting students as intended. 

This is unacceptable, and there’s no legitimate excuse for the delay. The Public Education Department has had more than 18 months to get the site up and running. 

Recent funding increases for public education included a tripling of dollars going into the state’s at-risk index. But until we can see school-level detail about how districts disburse money to their schools, we cannot know whether money targeted to at-risk students is, in fact, reaching them.

As it ponders another increase in funding for public education in New Mexico, the legislature would be wise to insist on a few assurances that will aid transparency and results driven investments. 

First, the department must commit to getting the budget transparency website up and running as early this year as possible. Second, the state must restart a robust assessment program, so that we have data to help understand how best to target investments.

Third, the legislature should require districts to participate in either one of the two generously funded state initiatives to provide students with additional learning time, while providing districts flexibility to tailor programming to student needs. Every student in New Mexico that wants more instruction time should have access to it. 

Yes, this has been a tough couple of years for educators, many of whom are exhausted. But there is plenty of money available to pay teachers well for the extra days of service that our students so desperately need and richly deserve.

It has become common to talk about the ways New Mexico can be the best in the region. We are striving to have the best paid teachers. We want to have the fairest funding system. These are critically important. However, I’m left wondering why we’re not having any conversations about being the best performing state, or being the state making the most progress year over year. 

With a billion dollars in investments we should be talking about inputs and outcomes. If at the end of the day, our students are no better prepared to achieve their dreams than they were five years ago, what have we really accomplished?

Editor's note: This article was written by Amanda

Quick Hits

Senate Bill 1, a bill to grant substantial raises to New Mexico educators continued its march through the State Senate Wednesday, passing out of the Finance Committee on a unanimous vote.

One piece of new information emerged: The raises will apply to assistant principals and principals as well as teachers. And those leaders will receive slightly larger raises, thanks to a “responsibility factor” which is a multiplier applied to a level III license salary to generate the salary of school leaders. Responsibility factors range from 1.1 times the base rate for an elementary school assistant principal to 1.6 times for a high school principal.

The salary hikes would make the minimum starting teacher salary in New Mexico $50,000 for teachers in the first three years of their career, which would make the state more competitive with neighboring states. Level 2, or “professional teachers” would be paid at least $60,000, and Level 3 teachers, those holding a “master teacher” license would earn a minimum of $70,000.

Republican Senator William F. Burt of Alamogordo, while voting for the raises, said results need to improve. “I have to say that we have to see better results coming out of schools .We have to see better grades, especially in the STEM areas. We have to have better graduation rates, and we have to lower the dropout rate.”

Bill sponsor Sen. Mimi Stewart, (D-Albuquerque) said she “agreed completely” with Burt’s remarks.

The bill now moves to the Senate Floor for its next vote. From there it will move on to the House of Representatives. 

Senate Bill 1, a bill to grant

Quick Hits

On a 5-3 party-line vote, the Senate Education Committee Monday advanced Senate Bill 140, which would make free public college available to all New Mexico residents.

The Opportunity Scholarship Program is a key component of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s 2022 education agenda. If passed into law, it would provide an annual infusion of $85.5 million that would combine various existing state college scholarship programs, including the Lottery Scholarship, and expand availability to all residents of the state, regardless of age.

State Sen. Elizabeth Stefanics, a Cerrillos Democrat and the bill’s co-sponsor, said the scholarships would “give New Mexicans a chance to change their lives.” She called the proposed scholarships “the most accessible free college program in the United States.”

If passed and signed into law, Opportunity Scholarships would provide full funding – tuition and fees – for up to 35,000 New Mexicans to work toward a certificate, an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree either part-time or full-time at any New Mexico public or Tribal college or university.

Stephanie Rodriguez, New Mexico’s secretary of higher education, said the average New Mexico college student is 26 years old and attends school part-time while also holding down a job. The scholarships, she said, would allow these students to obtain degrees without being burdened with large student loan debt.

Education committee Republicans, while lauding the goals of the program, worried about its ongoing costs, especially as New Mexico faces future budget uncertainties.

“Across the state right now enrollments are down everywhere and we’ve got to figure out how to get kids back into our colleges and universities, and certainly providing an opportunity to pay for a good part of that is one way to do it,” said Sen. Gay Kernan, a Republican from Hobbs.

But, Kernan added, given the near certainty that the state’s oil and gas industry revenues will dwindle in the coming years, committing significant new dollars to scholarship programs seems imprudent.

“We are acting like these dollars are always going to be there. And I will tell you in four or five years we’re going to be coming back in and we’re going to have to cut…I can’t support anything that’s going to create a recurring expense at this level.”

On a 5-3 party-line vote, the Senate