As NM officials differ on how to spend on education, one agency is bullish on teachers' raises

Public education spending is often one of the largest investments New Mexico lawmakers make each year. But figuring out exactly how to spend the money isn’t always so straightforward.

While the Legislative Education Study Committee, Legislative Finance Committee and the executive’s general fund education budget recommendations are similar — about $4.75 billion, $4.49 billion and $4.79 billion, respectively — they differ in funding for many individual initiatives, a presentation in front of the House and Senate Education Committees showed Monday.

One striking difference in each body’s budgets is recommended raises for school employees, with the LESC taking the top spot with proposed 6% pay increase.

That recommendation, LESC Director Gwen Perea Warniment told lawmakers, is in part because “they are the most important in education.”

“They are critical — that is where most of the budget goes,” she said of school employees’ compensation.

Next is the LFC’s recommendation of a total of 4% raises, followed by the executive’s recommendation of 3% raises for public school employees.

Last session, lawmakers granted public school employees 6% raises, and the year before, teachers saw their minimum salaries bumped by about $10,000 per level.

In the cases of the LESC and the LFC, raises fetched the highest price tags of any single line item, with nearly $189 million and about $125.5 million, respectively.

The executive’s largest single proposed investment, however, was for maintenance and operations — an expensive line item across the board — and for the state’s K-12 Plus program. Established last session, the program gives schools financial incentives for holding additional class time beyond 180 days under a normal school week and beyond 155 days under a four-day school week.

The executive’s larger recommendation for funding for the K-12 Plus program appears to be rooted in a controversial proposal pushed by the governor and the state Public Education Department to require all public schools to spend at least 180 days with students per year.

“We’ve seen the proven effectiveness of more time in class,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said of the proposal during her State of the State speech last week. “... It’s challenging, but it’s time that we do the right thing for our kids in New Mexico.”

When asked after the speech about how the 180-days proposal would be funded, PED spokesman Nate Williams said in an email last week that the governor had included an additional $76 million in K-12 Plus funding because “it is anticipated that schools will add K12+ days on top of the threshold of 180 instructional days to qualify for K12+ funding.”

That said, the PED has not yet released a decision on the initial proposal to establish the 180-days minimum.

The executive budget also would invest heavily in structured literacy initiatives the governor has pushed since the beginning of the session, including $30 million for a brick-and-mortar structured literacy institute that would serve in part as a hub for training teachers in the science of reading.

But the LFC’s budget would set aside only a tenth of that amount. And while the LESC matched an executive recommendation for $30 million for summer literacy programs to help struggling students, the committee did not recommend any money for the literacy institute.