The New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee met Wednesday to hear a report on the future of public education funding and resources in New Mexico.
State Secretary of Education Ryan Stewart presented a public school support request and outlined the prospective New Mexico Public Education Department budget.
The new budget will be cut by 5%, in line with cuts being presented by many other state agencies, leaving the department with a budget of over $3.3 billion dollars. Stewart says cuts were focused on areas with the least impact to students but did outline the areas where future investment could strengthen the public school system.
“It still does leave some areas where we would like to invest deeper in the organization. Our financial oversight through our School Budget and Fiscal Grants Bureau, we'd like to be able to invest deeper in that,” Stewart said. “IT is stretched very thin, so we're still hopeful to invest more in our IT functions. Investigations, unfortunately, continue to need to happen at an increasing rate…and then research and evaluation. We know that we would greatly benefit from having a more robust research and evaluation function.”
The public school support request included the addition of a family income index. The new index pulls from tax and census data to identify schools with a significant population of low-income students in need of funding. Stewart says the current at-risk index does not classify students by schools but rather by school districts, making it difficult to identify individual need.
“What the family income index would do, is it would direct funding to approximately those third of students who have the lowest incomes in the state,” Stewart said. “And provide additional resources to schools who are serving a disproportionate number of those students for a targeted set of activities, including academic enrichment, social and emotional health needs, supplementary support services, retaining educators, before and after school programs and a similar set of critical programs that would be really important to these schools, including one I should add around technology access.”
Stewart says the new index will help to address concerns highlighted in the Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit, a suit filed against the state citing a failure to provide a uniform education system that meets all students needs.
“We know that this was a major issue in Yazzie-Martinez that was cited,” Stewart said. “This notion that the school districts who are serving the highest percentage of our students in poverty are only getting marginally more funding than the average districts, despite the fact that they have significantly higher needs. And in addition to that, from our advocacy community, we know that there's been a push to determine additional funding possibilities for our at-risk students to make sure that we're able to fully meet the requirements that they have.”
A $95 million pandemic relief fund was also included in the public school support request. Stewart shared that the fund would work to support resources like extra counseling services, additional instructional hours and tutoring.
“How do we invest in coming back strong from this pandemic? We know that COVID has hit every sector of the state very hard. Education is certainly one of the harder areas that's been hit,” Stewart said. “Coming from the reform fund, we see a two-year program that’s specifically designed to address the impacts COVID has had.”
The state legislature will review the budget during its session in mid-January.
