Two education measures for ‘at-risk’ students not on annual spending bill
Sponsors say this is not the last time we will hear from them on these issues
All things come to those who wait.
Two pieces of legislation — both aimed at bettering the education of “at-risk” students — didn’t make it onto the House spending bill passed last week. Each faltered for their own reasons, but sponsors of both bills say this won’t be the last the Roundhouse will see of them.
The first, House Bill 140, was reined in by sponsor Rep. Derrick Lente, D-Sandia Pueblo, himself.
Lente said the decision to pull back on the bill, which would have set aside $50 million for a tribal education trust fund, was made not out of a lack of support but because he said the $50 million total wasn’t a robust enough investment.
Lente’s original plan was to set aside as much as $250 million, and he said he thinks he can get “far beyond the $50 million” during the interim.
“This is the way forward,” he said. “We got to do it right the first time and doing it right means that we have to have a really good firsttime investment.”
Money from the trust fund would be used to develop programs and curriculum — language revitalization, environmental protection and cultural site protection programs, for instance.
“We’re the experts of tribal education, we should be able to learn and create curriculum within our own communities and teach it here versus in a school district that in some cases might be 5 miles away, or 50 miles away,” he said.
All Pueblo Council of Governors Executive Director Teran Villa reiterated the importance of the trust fund, but agreed that it needed a larger investment and said putting it off for a year was acceptable, so long as more money is secured.
“We do not want any false promises,” he said. “We just hope that tribes are not left out.”
Another piece of legislation, House Bill 39, which would have included many instructional support providers — social workers, physical therapists, etc. — on the three-tier licensure and pay scale of teachers failed where it always seems to, said sponsor Rep. Liz Thomson, an Albuquerque Democrat.
The bill had sailed through both the committees it faced. But when it reached the House Appropriations and Finance Committee — which over the years Thomson’s been pushing the bill has often “been (her) downfall” — the bill once again faltered.
“I’m disappointed again, but I’ll keep on working on it,” she said. “I’m just stubborn.”
The real impact the bill would have, she said, is bettering the education of another group of New Mexico’s most underserved students — those with disabilities — by possibly helping to fill out the ranks of the educators who typically work with them the most.
Indigenous students and children with disabilities were among four student groups identified in the consolidated Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit, which in 2018 yielded a decision from a judge finding that New Mexico was violating the constitutional rights of “at-risk” students by not providing them a sufficient education system.
Oftentimes, Thomson said, there’s a misconception over how much her bill would cost — analysts this year put it somewhere between $3.1 million to $6.5 million, but she feels it wouldn’t cost that much.
A legislative analysis of state Public Education Department data found that almost two-thirds — 63% — of the educators the bill affects already make more than the minimum for Level 3 teachers of $70,000.
In some cases, like in Albuquerque, school districts negotiate with local unions to pay instructional support providers the same as their teacher counterparts.
Thomson’s goal, she told the Journal in late January, is to make sure all educators get those raises.
“My hope is that when raises come around, they don’t say ‘OK, we’re gonna give them to teachers and leave all these other people behind,’ ” she said. “I just want a level playing field so that there aren’t haves and have-nots in the education system, because we are all educators.”