New Mexico’s Public Education Department will hold a series of regional community meetings across the state next month to help inform the remedial action plan ordered to improve educational equity for at-risk New Mexico students.
The education department’s August meetings are part of the process of meeting First Judicial District Court Judge Matthew Wilson’s orders in the long-running Yazzie/Martinez lawsuit, which identified in 2018 that the state had failed to provide equitable learning opportunities for Native American and low income students, English Language Learners and children from low-income families.
Wilson found in April that the state had failed to address the concerns of the court and ordered the Public Education Department to assemble a remedial action plan. He gave the state until Oct. 1 to complete a draft of the plan and until Nov. 3 to file the final plan with the court.
The PED recently met the first deadline – identifying an outside expert to assist with the plan’s development – by July 1. The department partnered with the Northern New Mexico-based Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation.
According to a news release from the nonprofit, LANL Foundation President and CEO Gwen Perea Warniment said the foundation is devoted to “completing a transparent, trustworthy, and inclusive Action Plan that reflects the priorities of communities across the state.” She added that they intend to work with “students, families, tribal governments, educators, and advocates to ensure the Action Plan is not only comprehensive but also grounded in lived experience.”
Twelve community meetings are scheduled from Farmington to Carlsbad throughout August. Members of the public are invited to attend and provide their feedback, which will help inform the remedial plan.
Meeting locations include:
- Aug. 5 – Farmington, Española, Las Cruces
- Aug. 6 – Raton
- Aug. 7 – Santa Fe, Mescalero, Clovis
- Aug. 14 – Silver City, Zuni, Carlsbad
- Aug. 20 – Albuquerque
- Aug. 26 – Virtual Community Meeting
More details are available online.
According to the PED, the plan will address five areas including access to high-quality instruction; high-quality and linguistically-informed teachers; support services; effective funding; and accountability systems.
“The New Mexico Public Education Department is making steady progress toward developing the Martinez/Yazzie Action Plan,” PED spokesperson Janelle Taylor Garcia told Source NM in a written statement.
Transform Education NM Executive Director Loretta Trujillo told Source that her organization is “satisfied” with the progress made so far by the PED and LANL Foundation.
“They invited organizations who have demonstrated relationships to communities to be involved as facilitators of these different stakeholder meetings around the state. And so we have been invited to the table, so to speak,” Trujillo said. “We’ve always said, in our work as a coalition, that if community voices were at the center, that we could move the needle.”
Trujillo said she was particularly delighted that students themselves are invited to the meetings and will have the chance to share feedback on their own education. She said her organization has gathered groups of young New Mexicans in three parts of the state over the past year and a half and gathered feedback as well.
“What has manifested over six years or seven years now, is a lot of year-to-year initiatives that are not connected by a shared vision that everybody has in common,” Trujillo said. “This call for a comprehensive plan is, with that understanding in mind, in order to make funding decisions in any particular legislative session, we need our legislative body to understand that this depth of vision is all in one place. They’ve contributed to it, stakeholders have contributed to it, youth have contributed to it and we’re not just making one-off decisions.”
