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Thursday, January 20, 2011
APS Board Counters Martinez's Attack
By Hailey Heinz
Journal Staff Writer
The Albuquerque Public Schools board pushed back Wednesday against Gov. Susana Martinez's first State of the State speech, in which she took aim at New Mexico's largest district.
"To hear kind of the disrespect to the district that the governor gave this community, this board and this district was a disappointment," said board member Robert Lucero, who has called the governor "disingenuous" in the past for proposing cuts to education after saying during the campaign that she would not do so.
Martinez's speech on Tuesday attacked APS as being top-heavy and took a jab at the communications department.
"New Mexicans are not fooled when bureaucrats, whose salaries are many times that of the average teacher, claim the only place to cut is from the classroom. They're not fooled when a school district spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on PR staff and then claims it has nowhere to cut but the classroom. ... The truth is, the waste is there, and it must be eliminated," Martinez said in her speech.
Martinez has said that not enough education funding goes to classrooms, while too much goes to administration. She recently said administration includes principals, counselors and everyone who is not a teacher or educational assistant.
Board member David Peercy also criticized Martinez's education reform plan, which calls for assigning letter grades to schools, holding back third-graders until they learn to read, and adopting a merit pay system for teachers.
He said the plan is not based on research and should be scrapped in favor of other reforms.
APS chief financial officer Don Moya presented a budget update at Wednesday's meeting, comparing the three proposals that have been released by Martinez, the Legislative Finance Committee and the Legislative Education Study Committee. All three plans call for cuts to the APS operating budget of between 1.2 percent and 2.1 percent. That means a reduction between $7.2 million and $12.8 million, depending on the plan.
Moya also has told the board to brace for $31 million in cost increases, including utility costs and higher teacher salaries due to the three-tier licensure system.
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