COMMENTARY:
Our Las Cruces community hurting. Last year, teens at Young Park shot and killed 3 people, wounding 15 more. Now we are in the wake of another teen shooting, this time resulting in the death of a 13-year-old boy. Local and state officials are aiming at ways to prevent juvenile crime, such as through strengthening New Mexico’s juvenile crime laws. In order to be proactive, though, we need to make significant changes in NM’s public schools, where behavior problems are largely allowed to persist unchecked, year after year.
Naturally, parents should be teaching kids from a young age that they cannot hit others, take other kids’ toys, or damage another’s belongings. In school, these rules should be reinforced so that they are engrained by the time the kids reach adulthood. There must be consistent and sure enforcement of these rules, no matter whether people are young or old, rich or poor, Hispanic or white, housed or homeless. These are literally the overarching rules that allow society to survive.
There have always been some parents who don’t raise their kids well, but now our schools are perpetuating the same cycle. Back in 2024, on behalf of hundreds of NM teachers statewide, I urged the NM Public Education Department to stop the cycle of allowing kids to continually perpetuate violence at school with no real consequences. Kids in schools are throwing chairs in classrooms, hitting other kids or teachers, and even destroying bathroom facilities, yet the teachers aren’t allowed to really stop it.
Now, even the Albuquerque NM teacher’s union is admitting that school violence is out of control. In the Albuquerque Teachers Federation’s 2025-26 report titled, "Are the Educators Alright?" there are numerous quotes from teachers about unchecked violence in schools including the following:
"I have permanent spinal damage from being hit with a chair."
"Behavior and aggressive students are pretty much in every class."
"There is absolutely NO DISCIPLINE."
"Students know there are no consequences."
I know multiple teachers who have left NM public schools because they can no longer stand being abused day-after-day at work. Numerous others are on the verge of quitting because they see no other way out of the situation.
It's not just teachers who are concerned about these behavior issues. I organize a large local homeschool group and have talked to numerous parents who have pulled their kids from public school. Behavior problems, bullying, and violence are among the top issues that cause parents to pull their kids out of school.
For example, one mother related that in her daughter’s public-school class, one of the kids had intense temper tantrums. Instead of imposing consequences to help this child learn proper behavior, the teacher would take the rest of the kids out of the class and allow the child to trash the classroom. After growing up attending NM public schools in the 80’s and 90’s myself, I was shocked to hear this as it never would have happened at school back then.
As I’ve talked to more teachers and researched this situation, I’ve learned that this situation is now commonplace nationwide: a student starts having a violent meltdown and instead of being allowed to deal with it and impose consequences, the teachers are supposed to evacuate the rest of the students and allow the misbehaving student to wreck the classroom. Year after year, all these kids are learning that no one will stop a kid who chooses to hurt others, steal, or destroy.
In seeking to understand how this has come to pass, I learned that one root cause was a 2014 Obama-era policy prohibiting anything that looked like race discrimination in schools. That sounds like a good policy, but it turns out that the Executive Order went so far as to threaten loss of Federal funds to schools with higher rates of disciplinary actions against minorities, regardless of whether there really were higher rates of problems from those kids. In 2018, the Federal Commission on School Safety reported that “schools ignored or covered up — rather than disciplined — student misconduct in order to avoid any purported racial disparity in discipline numbers that might catch the eye of the federal government.” The report went on to say that, “[r]esearch clearly indicates that the failure of schools to appropriately discipline disruptive students has consequences for overall student achievement” and “disciplinary decisions are best left in the hands of classroom teachers and administrators” based on student behavior and not racial statistics.
The Obama-era policy was rescinded in 2018, but then a similar policy was put back into place in 2023. President Trump’s current Federal administration has rescinded the policy again in an Executive Order titled, “Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies.” Given the yo-yo effect of multiple Presidents and their Administrations overstepping their constitutional authority with such a policy, it is not surprising that schools are essentially continuing to follow the changes they initially made under the Obama era. The fact remains, though, that NM schools and schools nationwide are now under threat of losing Federal funding if they persist in allowing children’s violent behaviors to continue without consequences.
Regardless of the Federal situation, it is clear that allowing kids to perpetuate cycles of violent behavior in school in New Mexico is not working. I’m not advocating for corporal punishment in schools, but there must be real consequences or else the kids will continue down the path of destruction. By the time these kids are teens, they have escalated to fighting, doing drugs, shoplifting, stealing cars and guns, and shooting others. With New Mexico’s lax juvenile crime
laws and catch-and-release policies, these kids are ripe for getting involved with organized criminal gangs and cartels, who know that youths can break the law here with very little consequence. We now have many kids growing up with no respect for the most basic laws of society. And thus, we have high rates of juvenile crime with tragic consequences, like what is happening right here in Las Cruces.
It's not compassionate to allow kids to continue their violent, destructive behaviors. In the long run, this is harming kids as well as our community. Teachers and principals need to be allowed to impose swift, sure discipline for students who refuse to respect the rules. They need support from the Superintendents, School Boards, and state lawmakers in changing the culture.
Sarah Smith co-leads the New Mexico Freedoms Alliance, a non-partisan statewide grassroots coalition. She also organizes a group of 200+ New Mexico public school teachers, runs a homeschool group for 100+ families in Las Cruces, homeschools her two teens, and teaches Liberty-and-Leadership classes for teens. Sarah is a natural healthcare practitioner and former NASA aerospace engineer. She can be reached at concernedfornm@gmail.com.
Sarah Smith's opinions are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views of KRWG Public Media or NMSU.