APS Board Candidates Make Cases

With early voting over, school board candidates made one last pitch to voters Friday, at a candidate forum held at the University of New Mexico.

Larry Langley, running in District 7, and Don Duran, running in District 6, have both positioned themselves as harsh critics of the current Albuquerque Public Schools administration. Langley contends the district should be more open to Gov. Susana Martinez’s reform agenda, while Duran argues reform should happen at the individual school level.

“You cannot make reform in a tower somewhere away from the schools,” Duran said Friday. “You have to empower teachers and students and parents to make the decision about the education of their community.”

The election is Tuesday.

Duran is running in a four-way race in District 6, which includes the East Mountains and parts of the Northeast Heights. Also running in that race are incumbents Paula Maes and David Robbins and challenger Angela Gonzales Carver. Maes and Robbins were not at the Friday forum.

Gonzales Carver repeatedly emphasized the importance of community involvement and increased funding for education.

“Sufficient funding is key. Now, all the money in the world will not help the students if we do not have every community member, every teacher, every parent, the administration, all working together,” she said.

Langley, who has been a strong supporter of Martinez’s reform agenda, is up against incumbent David Peercy. Peercy is a critic of standardized tests, and believes they are taking too much classroom time.

“The main problem we have is we don’t have enough time for teachers to actually teach and students to learn. We’ve got to cut out a lot of these extra things that we’re requiring teachers to do and requiring students to do. We have high stakes testing, we spend a whole lot of time with the testing,” Peercy said. “That certainly could be a lot less.”

The third contested race is in District 3, which includes the North Valley and stretches into parts of the Northeast Heights. That is a three-way race between incumbent Lorenzo Garcia and challengers Candido Arturo Archuleta Jr. and Leah Persons.

In that race, Archuleta has been the most critical of the current administration, criticizing Superintendent Winston Brooks for his $250,000 salary, and saying APS should work more closely with charter schools.

Persons said teachers need more funding and autonomy to do their jobs.

“If there’s stress on the teacher because she doesn’t have enough books, doesn’t have enough materials, that puts pressure on her and her teaching ability,” Persons said. “Everything seems to be kind of top-down, the directives, but remember, it all happens in the classroom.”

Although Garcia is running as an incumbent, he has been critical of some things about the current administration, particularly when it comes to fostering diversity and closing the achievement gap. While on the board, he has advocated for front office staff who speak the language of the school community, and for all teachers to have bilingual certification.

“We need to be able to set up an organizational culture in the school system that values cultural proficiency,” Garcia said. “Have we been culturally blind? Yes. Have we been culturally ignorant? Yes. Have we been culturally destructive? Yes.”
— This article appeared on page C1 of the Albuquerque Journal