News

KUNM’s Gwyneth Doland stopped by today to give us an update on what’s happening at the Roundhouse in Santa Fe.  She’s been covering the 30-day session for N-M-politics-dot-net and K-N-M-E-TV.  Doland spoke to KUNM’s Elaine Baumgartel.

There’s been a deadly disease making its way West for the last five years.  It’s victims--bats.  Millions of them.  Scientists say White Nose Syndrome could even lead to the extinction of some species.  The disease has not been detected in New Mexico, but is so virulent that last year officials closed all the caves at El Malpais National Monument to prevent its potential spread. 

Preschool works. There is a wealth of evidence that early education is key when it comes to narrowing the achievement gap between Latino children and their peers. But across the country and this region, access to quality affordable preschool is lacking. As Jude Joffe-Block reports in this final installment of the Fronteras series on the Latino Achievement gap, a state-funded pre-K program in Nevada that is achieving results. 

Recent fatal attacks on police officers in the Mexican border city of Juarez have city officials on high alert. But despite this latest spike in violence, there's actually been talk around Juarez lately that the worst of times are over. The murder rate last year went down about 30 percent after three years of steady increases.  More people are going out to restaurants, concerts and public events. But are things really getting better? Fronteras Changing America Desk reporter Monica Ortiz Uribe visited one neighborhood in the city's outskirts to find out.  

It’s been about a year since the caves at El Malpais National Monument were closed over concerns about a disease spreading among bats.  But as KUNM’s Conservation Beat reporter Sidsel Overgaard reports, new information has officials starting to think about reopening some of them.

There may not be any ground hogs around to help New Mexicans celebrate February second.  But there are prairie dogs.  And a report out today says the state should be doing more to protect them.  KUNM's Sidsel Overgaard explains.

An estimated one in five children in the U.S. speaks a language other than English at home. In most of these homes, that language is Spanish. And yet the vast majority of these children are taught strictly in English at school. Some educators believe this is part of the reason Latino children are lagging in school compared to their white and Asian peers.

On Thursday UNM will host a talk by guest speaker Thomas Linzey.  Linzey, who works with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, is becoming known across the country for helping individual communities ban environmentally-damaging practices on a local level.

In the last fifteen years, California, Arizona, and Massachusetts have all replaced bilingual education with English Immersion.  This was supposed to help close the achievement gap. But by most measures, it hasn’t. 

Nationwide, Latinos attend preschool in lower numbers; drop out rates are higher, and fewer Latinos get college degrees.  But for Hispanic girls and women of college age-that gap disappears.