What Changed in Education this Session?

I’ve been devoting a lot of my blog content lately to highlighting education bills that made it through the Legislature and to the governor’s desk. Now that the bill signing period is over and the dust has settled, here’s a final roundup of what changed in New Mexico education law during the session. Everything on this list was signed by Gov. Susana Martinez.

-HB 53, which provides student loan repayment to teachers who go to work in low-income, high-needs schools. I wrote about the bill here.

-HB54, which requires school boards to establish cyberbullying prevention policies by August. Districts are already required by law to have anti-bullying policies in place, but this requires district policies to specifically address cyber bullying.

-HB112, which requires school accountability reports to include disaggregated data about the performance of different subgroups, like ethnic groups and students learning English.

-HB232, which requires school board candidates to report campaign contributions, the same way candidates for other offices do. APS already has a policy requiring this, but this codifies it in law and applies it to all districts.

-HB300, which requires schools to provide excused absences for pregnant and parenting teens. Here’s some past coverage by my colleague Deb Ziff, and a story by my colleague Jim Monteleone.

-HB310, which modifies the criteria for schools to qualify to have the K-3 Plus program. Before, at least 85 percent of a school’s students had to come from low-income families in order for the school to qualify. Now, schools can qualify if they have 80 percent or more low-income students or if they got a D or F school grade the previous year.

-HB462, which allows schools to continue getting class size waivers in order to cope with tight budgets. I wrote about the potential implications for APS here. The governor also signed the Senate companion bill, SB464.

-HB542, which is also known as the Community Schools Act. I wrote about it here.

-HB628, which provides an appropriation to cover special education funding requirements in the event that this issue with the feds doesn’t get resolved in NM’s favor.

-SB115, which reforms the Educational Retirement Board. The ERB has been struggling with solvency issues for years. I’m not the expert on this, but my colleague Dan Boyd is, and here is an overview from him.

-SB164, which loosens restrictions on funding for the New Mexico School for the Arts. Current law says the school must use private funding to pay for outreach, room and board. The bill amends this language to say the school can use other kinds of public funding, just not the money it receives through the state funding formula. My colleague T.S. Last has covered this issue.

-SB302, which allows traditional public schools to receive funding for homeschooled or charter school students who take one or more classes at their schools. Under the current system, many school districts do not allow students to enroll in just one or two classes, because schools don’t receive state funding to cover the cost of having an additional student in class. My colleague Elaine Briseno laid out the issue here.

There. Now you’re an expert on education bills that passed this year.