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PED to come to Albuquerque this week seeking input on remedial plan
New Mexico State University, Las Cruces Public Schools and non-governmental organizations staffed exhibition tables at the Martinez/Yazzie Action Plan regional community meeting in Las Cruces on Aug. 5. A similar meeting will take place in Albuquerque on Wednesday.
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The final in-person meeting of the Public Education Department’s statewide listening tour, which is working on a remedial plan to fix education in New Mexico, will take place in Albuquerque on Wednesday.
The meeting is from 4-7 p.m. at the Embassy Suites at 1000 Woodward Place NE on the eastern edge of Downtown.
The series of meetings began earlier this month. PED is seeking public input while it develops a court-mandated remedial plan to improve the quality of education it provides to underserved students.
Seven years after the landmark ruling in the Yazzie-Martinez case, which found that the quality of education provided to underserved students in the state was so poor that it violated their constitutional rights, a ruling in April of this year found that the PED had not done enough to improve since 2018 and required them to submit a remedial plan.
By October, PED must produce a draft remedial plan, “incorporating input from plaintiffs and stakeholders, and file a status report.”
According to the order from 1st Judicial District Judge Matthew Wilson, the department must “finalize the comprehensive remedial plan” by November.
PED has tapped two consultants: New Mexico-based Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation and the Phoenix-based nonprofit WestEd to help develop the plan, paying the companies around $200,000 each.
In addition to the Albuquerque meeting, PED will host two online meetings on Friday from 1-4 p.m. and on Aug. 26 from 4-7 p.m.
Before coming to the largest city in the state, the department held similar meetings in Farmington, Española, Las Cruces, Raton, Santa Fe, Mescalero, Clovis, Silver City, Zuni and Carlsbad.
The Yazzie-Martinez case was first brought over a decade ago, in 2014, when Wilhelmina Yazzie, the parent of a student at Gallup-McKinley County Schools, and Louise Martinez, the parent of an Albuquerque Public Schools student, joined other parents to file a lawsuit against the state, tasking it to improve its education system.
