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New Mexico In-Depth
Photo Essay: Indigenous Women’s Day celebrates female leadership and resilience while spotlighting ongoing struggles
Over 100 people gathered at the Roundhouse on Saturday for the annual Indigenous Women’s Day, starting with a prayer walk through O’Ga P’Ogeh, the Tewa word for Santa Fe that the event’s organizers used, meaning “white shell water place.” It was the third year the event was held in person after pausing during the pandemic.
Tribal education trust fund on hold until next year, when sponsor predicts it’ll have more support
Advocates of a proposed trust fund that would give New Mexico’s tribes more money and freedom to build out their own education departments have agreed to abandon efforts to get $50 million into this year’s budget in return for making a much larger ask in 2024. The bill’s...
Lawmakers tackle raising the alcohol tax
A bill to impose a 25-cent tax hike on alcoholic drinks goes before its first legislative hearing of the session Friday. Looming over it is the 2017 defeat of a similar bill by the alcohol industry. Much has changed in six years. The mood of the Legislature appears different in...
Lawmakers seek to close big transparency gap
There were bound to be gaps in a 2019 revision to New Mexico’s dense elections transparency law that sought to force independent groups who aren’t required to register as political committees to disclose the money they spend in elections. The changes were quickly put to the test the...
Gallup School Superintendent Says Changing a Label Explains Away Its Harsh Native Student Discipline. It Doesn’t.
At New Mexico in Depth and ProPublica, we practice “no surprises” journalism: No one should read anything about themselves in our articles without first having had a chance to respond. So journalists in our newsrooms were surprised to read in the Gallup Sun, a weekly newspaper, that the...
Lawmakers want more timely reporting of campaign cash
In the final week of the 2022 general election, almost $350 thousand dollars went to candidates that wasn’t reported until this month when the election was long over. That’s because smaller cash contributions in the final days of a New Mexico general election aren’t reported under New Mexico law until two months later when “no one cares because we’re off to other things,” said Rep. Matthew McQueen, D-Galisteo, who with Sen. Bill Tallman, D-Albuquerque, is sponsoring a bill that would speed up the reporting cycle.
Proposed Office of Alcohol Prevention steps up ambition, but is short on vision
The New Mexico Department of Health has asked the legislature for $5 million to build an Office of Alcohol Prevention, which would expand the staff focused on reducing excess drinking from a single epidemiologist to a team of 13. If created, the office would represent a significant increase in resources and personnel focused on the state’s epidemic of alcohol-related deaths, by an agency long cowed into inaction against the challenge.
Native leaders say tribal education trust fund would be game changer
Education programs run by Native American tribes in New Mexico rely in part on money from the state, but accessing those dollars makes it difficult to complete all of the work they envision. Tribal leaders and advocates have long lobbied for a change. This year they want to make it...
Push for lawmaker pay coming to Santa Fe
It’s been more than 30 years since the last time New Mexicans voted against paying state lawmakers a salary, first in 1990 and again in 1992. Now, some lawmakers think the mood has shifted and it’s time to ask voters again. The need has grown, they say, while the Legislature remains hobbled by volunteer lawmakers who lack paid staff and in many cases must juggle outside work in order to live.
Gallup School Superintendent Says Our Story About Expulsions in His District Is Incorrect. Here’s Why He’s Wrong.
This article was produced in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories from ProPublica like this one as soon as they are published. And sign up here for New Mexico In Depth stories. Over the four academic years ending in spring 2020, Gallup-McKinley...
Native students are expelled in New Mexico far more than any other group. This school district is ground zero for the disparity.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with New Mexico In Depth. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. And sign up here for journalism from New Mexico In Depth. One chilly March afternoon, dozens of...
How We Found the School District Responsible for Much of New Mexico’s Outsized Discipline of Native Students
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with New Mexico In Depth. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. And sign up here for journalism from New Mexico In Depth. New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica...
Deaths due to drinking rose sharply in 2021
More than 2,200 New Mexicans died of alcohol-related causes in 2021, according to new estimates from the Department of Health, capping a decade in which such fatalities nearly doubled and setting a new high-water mark in a state already beset by the worst drinking crisis in the nation. The updated...
Politics trumps health in state’s response to alcohol crisis
In February 2021, as New Mexico lawmakers considered landmark legislation to loosen restrictions on alcohol sales, the state’s alcohol epidemiologist Annaliese Mayette set out to assess the bill. Excessive drinking kills people in New Mexico at a faster clip than anywhere else in the country, and the proposal would...
Indian Affairs Committee wants $3 million for Attorney General work on missing and murdered Indigenous people cases
The Attorney General’s Office has made advances this year in addressing the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people (MMIP), but it needs dedicated funding from the Legislature to keep it up, Mark Probasco, deputy director of the office’s Special Prosecutions Division, told the Indian Affairs Committee on Thursday.
State coordinator says New Mexico likely undercounts homeless students
School districts across New Mexico are likely failing to accurately count the number of students experiencing homelessness, Dana Malone, coordinator for the state’s Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program, told New Mexico In Depth. That failure means vulnerable children probably are missing out on crucial services and being...
Thousands of schools fail to count homeless students
For months, Beth Petersen paid acquaintances to take her son to school — money she sorely needed. They’d lost their apartment, her son bouncing between relatives and friends while she hotel-hopped. As hard as she tried to keep the 13-year-old at his school, they finally had to switch districts.
Schools must help homeless students. Here’s what you should know.
This story was produced as part of a collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity, The Seattle Times, Street Sense Media and WAMU/DCist. See New Mexico In Depth’s story here. When is a student considered homeless?. The definition of homelessness among K-12 students is laid out in the McKinney-Vento...
Couy Griffin is New Mexico’s fly in the ointment
Looking westward and north to Arizona and Colorado, New Mexico should count itself lucky three days after Election Day. Vote counting continues in those states. Here in New Mexico, no major disruptions marred Election Day and the vast majority of contests, including the governor’s race, slipped into history Tuesday night without any drama. Even the state’s marquee federal race, the 2nd Congressional District featuring Democrat Gabe Vasquez and Republican incumbent Yvette Herrell, with its potential national implications, ended quietly with Vasquez winning by 1,300 votes and Herrell conceding defeat.
COVID grew New Mexico hunger relief network
Two years ago, in March 2020, Delfine Gabaldon visited a food pantry for the first time. He’d been laid off from work at the start of the coronavirus lockdown and didn’t know how he would make ends meet. For 32 years, Delfine had worked as a mechanic. “I...
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