The state’s largest school district will see a $22 million budget cut in the upcoming fiscal year, and more than 70 percent of the money designated for salaries will go to teachers and educational assistants, according to the Albuquerque Journal. The budget for Albuquerque Public Schools will be $594 million after a 3.3 percent cut from the legislature.

The Journal reported that the shortfall was caused by increased utilities and the costs of increasing pay for teachers who move up the pay scale.

The plan will cut nearly 400 positions, including 183 teachers positions. APS hopes most of the jobs are lost through attrition.

The budget will go to the school board for review and is expected to be voted on by June.

APS superintendent Winston Brooks has been criticized by Gov. Susana Martinez over the amount of money spent on administrative positions in the school district.

Martinez said that APS was “refusing to admit that there are dollars that can be cut in the bureacracy” and instead wanted to cut money from the classrooms.

It’s a daunting subject for an inaugural debate. The state’s educational picture is complex, one that defies easy prescriptions and bumper-sticker rhetoric, although examples of each might be in ample supply during tonight’s face off.

For many though, the subject boils down to this: Despite persistent efforts to improve the state’s standings New Mexico still lags at the bottom of many national lists measuring educational performance and attainment. The question on many people’s minds is what will Denish or Martinez do about it if elected governor.

It’s not for a lack of trying that New Mexico has remained buried at the bottom of many educational measures.

The state has expanded its pre-kindergarten programs in recent years, acting on the growing body of research that says the earlier a child can read the better chances are that he or she will graduate from high school. Public school teachers are paid more. And requirements needed to graduate from high school are stronger today than in the past, an improvement that prepares more students for college says the respected College Board.

New Mexico and teachers’ unions also agreed recently to work together to devise “a fair system of linking a major part of teacher evaluation, not necessarily pay, to student growth,” Veronica Garcia, the state’s former education secretary, said.

But despite all the effort there hasn’t been an accompanying, noticeable rise in student test scores. The gap between Anglo students’ test scores and that of their minority counterparts – called the achievement gap – has stubbornly persisted.  And high school graduation rates, while having improved, remain low by national standards.

Garcia said she is watching the race to see where the candidates come down on continuing the state’s efforts, which some have described as laying a strong foundation for moving forward.

“All of those different reforms need to be continued,” Garcia told the Independent on Wednesday. ”I think there are some people who want to back off high school requirement rates.”

Candidates push competing plans

For her part, Martinez, the GOP candidate, has said if she is elected governor she’d focus on getting more money back into the school classrooms to improve New Mexico’s standings.

The Republican wants to plow more than $70 million of already existing dollars back into the classroom, taking it from the bureaucracy. The money will help to recruit and retain good teachers, buy textbooks and to expand remedial help to struggling students and schools, her campaign has said.

Annual efficiency studies for New Mexico’s 89 local school districts also would help state officials discern “where taxpayer dollars are working and where they aren’t,” Martinez has said.

In the one area involving education that has generated noticeable friction between the candidates Martinez also has said she supports giving students and their families the opportunity of ‘school choice.’ Martinez has defined that as giving families the opportunity to choose whether to attend their neighborhood public school or a charter school, vocational school, or a virtual classroom.

The Denish campaign had another word for Martinez’s position — vouchers, a controversial idea in educational circles.

To drive home its point, the Denish camp linked to a video in which Martinez is recorded as saying public dollars should follow a student to a “Christian school, a Bapstist” school if that’s where the parent thinks the child should go to school.

Martinez’s campaign said she is trying to give students more opportunities but that she doesn’t support traditional vouchers.

For her part, Denish has said she has a better plan for moving New Mexico education forward and it involves a lot of what she’s already done during the eight years as the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor.

Most recently Denish cast the lone vote at the State Board of Finance against across-the-board 3.2 percent cuts to state agencies. She voted that way because the cuts would have included public education, Denish has said.

Denish also hasn’t been shy about touting her support for early childhood education in New Mexico, and how she fought for funding to expand “a state program which provided access to quality education for more than 1,400 children,” according to her campaign.

Meanwhile, the Democrat has focused on New Mexico’s low high school graduation rates, in 2009  hosting a Graduation Summit for New Mexico, a symposium that convened more than 500 people, her campaign said. The participants included young people, educators, lawmakers, administrators, the business community and non-profits who came together to address high school graduation and other critical issues, her campaign said.

School nutrition and other priorities

While the two candidates have laid out various plans to improve test scores and bump up high school graduation rates, Mary Jo Quintana, a parent with two children at Sunset View Elementary in Albuquerque, wants to know where the two women stand on another issue: school nutrition and physical fitness, specifically a bill currently before Congress.

The federal legislation,  introduced by New Mexico’s junior U.S. Senator, Tom Udall, would raise health and physical education classes to the level of core subjects, making them requirements.

“There’s been numerous studies on how eating healthy and exercise produce better test results,” Quintana said, adding that better nutrition appears linked to higher educational attainment as well. “It’s not like we’re making this up,” Quintana said.

For now the election season leading up to the November election gives the two gubernatorial candidates time to hone their educational proposals, but a difficult reality will greet the next governor as soon as January, her first month in office. That’s when the New Mexico Legislature convenes to deal with the state’s woeful budgetary situation.

New Mexico is short of cash thanks to tax revenues that haven’t kept up with spending.  And policy makers must decide whether or not to exempt public school funding from painful cuts that look all but certain, or to cut other programs and agencies deeper if public education is exempted. Raising taxes is yet another option, a politically delicate but potentially necessary one for the first-term governor.

Funding for public education accounts for nearly half of all state spending.

For Garcia, the state’s former public education secretary, she hopes the next governor will remain committed to efforts already put in place.

“It is critical,” Garcia said. “We don’t want to go backwards. Because of funding we may not be abe to expand like we wanted to, but we have to stay the course.”

Roughly $2 million of the total will go toward helping 33,400 teachers and school employees across the state pay their insurance premiums, according to a news release issued by the governor’s office Monday. The stimulus dollars will reduce insurance premiums by an average of 2 percent for the 2010-11 school year.

The remainder of the money — $500,000 — will go toward professional development for roughly 2,000 educational assistants in Albuquerque Public Schools.

“New Mexico’s teachers and school employees are dedicated public servants and I am committed to helping them through the current recession,” Richardson is quoted as saying in the release. “Our teachers, educational assistants and support staff are on the front lines of school reform every day, and they’ve been subject to rising health care costs in recent years. I am pleased that these Recovery Act funds will help us offset some of those costs.”

The award comes from a discretionary fund made available to the governor as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the release said.

The $2.5 million is separate from and in addition to the $65 million New Mexico is supposed to receive in additional federal education dollars after Congress passed a $26 billion bill last week to help state out during the recession.

Under a complicated scenario that assumes APS might be staring at a $19 million budget hole because of ongoing state budget woes, that $15 million won’t be enough to avoid district layoffs, APS spokesman John Miller told The Independent on Wednesday.

However Superintendent Winston Brooks believes attrition — not replacing individuals who leave APS jobs — could make up that $4 million difference, Miller said.

APS estimated last week that it would receive $22 million of the $65 million in education money the state of New Mexico is set to receive after Congress passed a $26 billion aid bill Tuesday that included $10 billion for public schools across the country.

The $15 million wouldn’t cover APS’s budget hole under a complicated scenario that assumes that the state’s largest school district would have to cut 3.2 percent from this year’s spending plan because of budget problems at the state level. State officials are asking state agencies to cut 3.2 percent from their budgets, including from the Public Education Department, because state revenues continue to lag far behind expenses.

That trimming will affect every school district in the state, state education spokesman said Wednesday.

A 3.2 percent cut in APS’ budget would amount to $19 million, $4 million more than the $15 million the district is expecting, Miller said.

Nuts and bolts are still unclear

Because Congress passed the legislation yesterday, state officials are still trying to discern the nuts and bolts of how the money will be distributed, meaning the latest $15 million estimate for APS could change again.

“Anything can happen,” Miller said. “As our superintendent said yesterday, we don’t have money in the bank.”

Steve Burrell, the interim deputy secretary of finance and operations at the New Mexico Public Education Department, said New Mexico is still awaiting federal guidelines on how the extra education money can and should be spent and how it is to be distributed to local school districts.

Whether all New Mexico school districts will receive a share of the extra dollars depends on the formula the state uses,  Burrell explained. The state could funnel the money through the state’s equalization funding formula, which would send the extra federal dollars to every school district in New Mexico. Or it could funnel the additional dollars to school districts with a high number of students who qualify for free or reduced lunches, a program to help low-income students.

“My guess is that we will try to funnel it though the funding formula to offset the decreases in the state general fund,” Burrell said Wednesday.

But until the federal government provides guidelines on how the money should be spent, “we are in a holding pattern,” Burrell said.

The Rio Grande Sun reports the Española City Council approved an additional $360,000 budget cut for 2011 after the finance department realized insurance costs for employees had raised the basic budget by $500,000. The new cuts will leave three police positions vacant and make it possible to cut services from the senior center, library, parks and recreation.

The company that plans to build a wind farm on Bernal Mesa in San Miguel County said the proposed three-mile setback from homes would kill the project and is a far greater distance than the standard setback for wind turbines, reports The Las Vegas Optic.

The Farmington Daily Times reports during an emergency meeting Thursday city councilors approved an ordinance to maintain residents’ eligibility for federal flood insurance coverage.

KRQE-TV reports the State of New Mexico supplied state employees with 39,000 bottles of water in the 2009 fiscal year, which cost approximately $117,000.

Here’s a key fact from the AP story:

Public Education Secretary Susanna Murphy released the latest testing information on Monday that showed 644 schools — or 78 percent — didn’t reach state-established improvement goals this year. That’s up from 560 schools, or 68 percent, in 2009.

The statewide stats translated into some striking local numbers.

In Santa Fe, three of the city’s 27 schools met this year’s goal for student improvement, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Only 17 of Albuquerque’s schools met the goal, reported the Albuquerque Journal.

Local and state education officials made clear Monday that they thought the annual measure of student improvement doesn’t capture how individual students and schools are progressing, or the complexity of delivering education in the 21st century.

Some schools barely missed the goal. And that highlighted another fact of the yearly assessment. One or two students who fail to show enough progress can make the difference between a school meeting its goal or not, officials said.

Here’s a presentation from yesterday’s announcement of statewide results made by the state’s new education secretary, Susanna Murphy.

Childhood obesity is a growing epidemic nationwide that is blamed for a steady uptick in youth-onset diabetes and that can lead to chronic illnesses in adulthood, according to researchers.

Thanks to various reports, New Mexico knows that nearly 30 percent of its high school students and a quarter of 2- to 5-year-olds enrolled in a government program are overweight or obese. But the state Department of Health plans to fill in data gaps this fall when it begins to collect the body mass index levels for kindergarteners and third graders at 50 elementary schools, with an expectation of expanding the program to 50 new schools each year.

While quick to praise  the state’s plan this week, local officials, advocates and parents said this week they already know it’s a problem and they’re anxious for more help now.

“A lot more work needs to be done,” Cheryl Lucero, the incoming president of the Albuquerque’s Zia Elementary Parents Teachers Association, said of New Mexico’s efforts.

For starters, New Mexico doesn’t supplement federal funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture School Meal program with its own dollars, as other states do. The extra funding could help schools buy more fresh fruit and vegetables for school meals, said Jennie McCary, wellness manager at Albuquerque Public Schools.

New Mexico also could throw its support behind the Farm to School initiative, a program that gives preference to local growers to get fresh produce into schools, advocates say. It’s an idea that’s being pushed by the New Mexico Food and Agriculture Policy Council.

Sugary beverages could be taxed to dissuade their consumption, said Erin Marshall, executive director of the New Mexico Healthier Weight Council. State lawmakers should expect to see that idea pushed during the 2011 legislative session. The council and other advocates plan to press that issue after the proposal surfaced but failed during this year’s legislative session.

Changes at the local level also could help, advocates say.

“It could be as simple as leaving gates unlocked” at school playgrounds so neighborhood children can play there during weekends and get more exercise, Marshall said.

“Other schools have community gardens,” she added. “Some schools have opened their facilities basketball courts – for children.”

Marshall’s group already is working to start a clearinghouse of sorts of “better practices” that will feature ideas from school districts and communities that have adopted healthful ideas to help foster greater communication among New Mexico’s communities.

“If Moriarty is doing something that works for them, would it work out in Magdalena?” Marshall asked.

Childhood obesity can lead to expensive health problems in adulthood

Childhood obesity is a large issue with a rising public profile, advocates and officials say.

The health risks associated with it are immense. Obesity at a young age can lead to the onset of diabetes during youth. And numerous government reports say obese and overweight children are likelier to suffer from chronic diseases such as heart disease, certain cancers and diabetes as adults, adding to the costs of health care.

As in the rest of the nation, childhood obesity rates appear to be growing in New Mexico.

The obesity rate for New Mexico’s children ages 2 to 5 years who participate in the Women Infants Children government program increased by nearly 30 percent from 2000 to 2007, going from 9 percent to 12.7 percent, according to a July 2009 state report titled Healthy Kids Healthy New Mexico.

Expanded waistlines are in greater evidence among older children too. In 2007 24.4 percent New Mexico’s high school students were overweight or obese, according to the same report. Two years later, the portion of high school students who were overweight or obese had increased to nearly 30 percent, according to a 2009 state Department of Health report titled Youth Resiliency and Risk Survey.

McCary of Albuquerque Public Schools confirms a similar finding among students in the state’s largest school district.

“We’re matching national numbers,” she said of the 25,000 Albuquerque Public School students whose body-mass index has been collected by the state’s largest school district in recent years.

Tough times for tackling childhood obesity

The state’s push to gauge the size of the problem comes at a time when budget pressures have cut deeply into health spending, rendering proposals like extra state dollars to help pay for school meals a tough sell to state lawmakers.

Funding for 33 county and community health councils and five Tribal Health Councils around the state has been slashed, a big hit to battling childhood obesity.

The councils “coordinate different agencies, organizations, in a community or county, that are addressing health needs at the local level,” Marshall said. “They are critical for addressing obesity.”

Mary Jo Quintana, for one, says the state needs to set its priorities and tackling childhood obesity should  be high up on its list.

A school parent with two children at Sunset View Elementary in Albuquerque, Quintana, like Lucero, sits on the Albuquerque Public Schools’ Physical Activity and Nutrition Advisory Committee.

“What they keep saying as we meet is it’s more than obesity,” Quintana said. “This also affects the graduation rates. There’s a strong tie in. It’s all connected. If we can get healthier children we can come up with better test results.”

Still, Quintana is thankful to see the state moving on the issue, even if it’s to get a better sense of how prevalent childhood obesity is.

“The state getting involved will help us,” Quintana said. ”We’re trying to move a mountain and they are helping us move that mountain faster. They are providing a lot of support.”

But the funds, which would have come from federal stimulus money, appear headed elsewhere after Gov. Bill Richardson decided last week to line-item veto the provision directing the money to education.

“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act gave governors the authority to allocate the ARRA money, not legislatures, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the ability to allocate federal funds is beyond the Legislature’s appropriating power,” Nicole Gillespie, a spokesman for the governor’s budget office, said Wednesday in a statement, explaining the governor’s reason for vetoing the provision.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is the official name for the federal stimulus program.

News of Richardson’s decision to veto the educational funding has left advocates flummoxed at a time when local school districts already are confronting economic difficulties.

“For him to veto supports for public education … makes a bad situation more incomprehensible,” said Christine Trujillo of American Federation of Teachers.

Added Rep. Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, who is a frequent defender of funding for public education: “I am just disheartened in general over what the Legislature and the governor have done to education.”

The governor’s veto will contribute to school districts having “larger class sizes and we will not produce the kind of improvement the public is clamoring for,” Stewart said.

The $15 million in federal funds that would have gone to school districts, and another $5 million on top of that, will instead go to agencies across state government, Gillepsie said. The governor has committed to “using $20 million of his discretionary (federal) funds to balance the budget” after deciding last week to veto a food tax provision in legislation — an action that left a $68 million hole in next year’s state budget.

“State agencies have seen more than $700 million in budget cuts since FY09 and the Governor plans to use these funds where they are needed most to prevent additional reductions,” Gillepsie said in the statement.

It is unclear how much each school district would have received if the $15 million in federal dollars had been dispersed, but the extra money, however small,  likely would have been welcome given the economic woes many school districts face.

Albuquerque Public Schools is staring at a multimillion-dollar shortfall that may require the elimination of hundreds of jobs, superintendent Winston Brooks announced last week.

Rio Rancho schools, meanwhile, likely will confront hard decisions for next year’s budget in addition to millions of dollars already trimmed over the past year, a spokesman said.

“We’re still waiting for the real numbers,” Kim Vesely, spokesperson for Rio Rancho Public Schools, said Wednesday of the state budget and its effects on local school district budgets.

With the governor’s veto, state educational funding would be cut by close to 2 percent, which could mean “$2 million out of the (Rio Rancho schools’) operational budget,” Vesely said.

Legislators had hoped that that the $15 million in federal dollars would soften a reduction in state education funding from 1.8 percent to a 1.2 percent reduction, state lawmakers said during this month’s special legislative session.

“After a while you run out of things to cut. It’s going to be tough for everyone around the state,” Vesely said.

The cuts to education contained in next year’s state budget come on top of past reductions, including the loss of $29 million school districts around the state had counted on but won’t see.

During a separate special legislative session in October the Legislature included a provision that would have paid school districts’ annual insurance premiums to the tune of $29 million. The thinking was that by the state covering that expense, local school districts could direct money normally earmarked for that to other areas.

The Legislature repealed that provision during this year’s regular session.

“The Governor has always fought to protect funding for schools, which is why he signed a bill in the 2009 special session that appropriated $29 million to pay schools’ property insurance premiums,” Gillespie said. “This session policy makers advocated repealing that appropriation as it was thought to create a disparity problem in which school districts would receive inequitable distributions.”

The provision – Section 12 — that would have given local school districts the $15 million in federal funding is tucked away on page 244 of the 247-page state budget. The vetoed language directed $25 million in federal stimulus money — $15 million to school districts and charter schools and $10 million to state agencies – to cushion the pain of budget cuts made to services and programs.

“It is unfortunate that APS jumped the gun, discussed preliminary data and has ignited public confusion.

“No public trust should be lost. The reason we have review processes in place is to ensure that we have the most accurate data possible when we finalize the numbers the first week of October. I am incredulous at the implication that somehow PED is responsible for the inaccuracy of the district’s self-reporting and subsequent corrections.”

“As is routine practice, districts self report data to the Public Education Department as a part of our statewide accountability system. Districts are given the benefit of having two opportunities per quarter to review, update, and validate their data. We have been working with APS and 88 other districts statewide for five years to ensure data quality and to report numbers publicly to hold New Mexico schools to a new level of accountability. As indicated by APS, their data quality was poor, and they submitted over 1700 corrections after their original submission. As is routine practice, we are working closely with the district to audit the data and certify the final numbers. That process will not conclude for the 89 districts statewide until the first week of October, as has been the practice for the last five years.”

“Let’s not lose focus. Bottom line, we have approximately 40,000 students that have dropped out of New Mexico’s high schools over the last four years.  We need to know the final graduation rate, but we also need to identify how we are going to keep students in local high schools so they can graduate with a diploma and the skills to function in college or a career. That is the purpose of Graduate New Mexico and that should continue to be the focus.”

Reporter Andrea Schoellkopf writes that “Albuquerque Public Schools could face immediate cuts of $25 million to $30 million in its $668.5 million budget if the state orders budget cuts for public education.”

Gov. Bill Richardson and state lawmakers are beginning to negotiate how to close a projected $441 million budget gap for the year that ends June 30. And while the governor has come out against cutting public school spending, state lawmakers in on the negotiations say such an option must remain on the table.

If indeed the state’s public school spending is trimmed, “you’re in a heap of doo-doo,” Schoellkopf quotes Albuquerque Public Schools Superintendent Winston Brooks as telling the school board recently.

Schoellkopf goes on to write:

Brooks said layoffs are a possibility because the district already has agreed to tap into its $22 million reserve fund. Under recently approved labor agreements, the district will spend about $6 million from the reserve fund to pay all APS employees for one-time reimbursement for training outside the work day.

Districts were warned last month that the state’s tax base was deteriorating more quickly than expected, with a $433 million state budget gap. Brooks said legislators have told school districts they might see a 3 percent to 5 percent cut in this year’s budget.

But Albuquerque Teachers Federation president Ellen Bernstein tells the Journal that state law prevents class sizes from being increased, so the district could not cut “a bunch of teachers.”

“There’s a lot of ways to balance the budget without cutting education,” Bernstein said. “They already cut by $30 a student. School districts are dying… Programs are to the bare bones.”

The union has proposed rolling back tax cuts that were approved in 2003, closing corporate loopholes that cost the state $60 million to $80 million and investing $1.8 billion in federal stimulus dollars.

Whether or not the state’s public school spending is ultimately trimmed this year will depend on the final budget agreement the governor and the Legislature reach sometime in the next two months.

I suspect that like many teachers, teachers’ aides, school administrators and parents across the state are interested in what the state ultimately decides to do.