SFPS officials: Funding increase not enough
Lawmakers told that staffing, resource issues will need to be addressed for school system to comply with Yazzie/Martinez order
Officials with Santa Fe Public Schools told state lawmakers Friday that if staffing and resource shortages aren’t addressed, they will become insurmountable obstacles as the district works to comply with a judge’s order for New Mexico to improve education services for its most vulnerable groups of students.
In this year’s legislative session, lawmakers approved more than $480 million in new funding for education, including money to increase teacher pay, to help satisfy a state district judge’s 2018 order in a landmark lawsuit, Yazzie/Martinez v. State of New Mexico.
The lawsuit had argued the state’s public education system was failing low-income kids, Native Americans, special-education students and English-language learners.
“While helpful and appreciated, the increase in public school funding in the 2019 legislative session was not adequate,” Kristy Janda-Wagner, a deputy superintendent of Santa Fe Public Schools, told the Legislative Education Study Committee during a hearing Friday.
“In fact,” she said, “we still haven’t gotten back to 2008 funding levels when adjusted for inflation. The state still has a lot of work to do to make the transformational change in our school system necessary to comply with the New Mexico Constitution.”
Janda-Wagner attributed her statements to Superintendent Veronica García, who had planned to attend the hearing but missed it due to the birth of a grandchild.
While the Santa Fe district received an additional $7.1 million from the state this school year, Janda-Wagner said, $6.7 million of it went to mandatory raises for employees. The district needs to hire 23 more full-time nurses, 25 full-time social workers, 30 full-time, specially trained counselors and 25 full-time community school coordinators, she said — but it doesn’t have enough funding.
“We would further implement after-school programming to provide services such as tutoring and constructive after-school support to many students who have no supervision after school,” JandaWagner said.
State Rep. Christine Trujillo, D-Albuquerque, chairwoman of Legislative Education Study Committee, was sympathetic. “I don’t believe that public education has been sufficiently funded ever,” she said. “We’re always trying to catch up.”
There is hope for another infusion of education
funding in the 2020 legislative session beginning in January.
In August, the Legislative Finance Committee projected the state will see some $907 million in new revenue in the next fiscal year, as oil and gas production continues to increase in the Permian Basin.
“There’s a lot of money now,” Trujillo said. “I hope the people who make the budgetary decisions stop saying, ‘Oh, that’s for the future.’ ”
Democratic state Sen. Bill Soules, a former elementary school principal in Las Cruces and member of the committee, said lawmakers must begin to allocate education funding in a way that allows more flexibility for public school districts.
“We’ve hamstrung so many of our districts that are doing good things by putting too many strings on the money they need to fix the problems within their districts,” Soules said.
For instance, the state Public Education Department introduced a new program this year to help combat an achievement and opportunity gap for low-income students. K-5 Plus, an expanded version of a previous initiative called K-3 Plus, adds 25 summer days to the beginning of the school year for low-income kids in kindergarten to grade 5.
Funding for the program comes from the Public Education Department rather than school districts’ operations budgets.
But a key requirement for the program is that teachers follow students from K-5 Plus sessions into their regular classroom when the school year starts. With a narrow time frame to organize classrooms to meet the requirement before the application deadline, many schools were forced to forgo the program this summer.
According to Janda-Wagner, the Santa Fe district spent $165,000 from its operations budget to fund summer classrooms for schools that missed out on K-5 Plus.
Gwen Perea Warniment, deputy secretary of the Public Education Department, acknowledged it will take time to get K-5 Plus — a program that has shown promise in boosting student achievement — operating smoothly in districts across the state.
“The program needs time to amp up,” she said. “There’s a lot of intentionality needed to get to a level where an entire school is built out to support K-5 Plus. That takes a good three years.
“Right now, we’re figuring out how to be flexible and support schools and districts to get to that point,” Warniment added.