New Mexico's top prosecutor vows to move ahead with Native education litigation - By Susan Montoya Bryan Associated Press
It's been five years since a New Mexico judge issued a landmark ruling finding that the state was falling short in providing an adequate education to Native American students and many others, and the pace of progress since has been frustratingly slow for tribal leaders.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said he intends to take over the ongoing litigation that led to the ruling from Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham's office to ensure that the state complies with court-ordered mandates.
The announcement was made public Tuesday, just days after Torrez met with Pueblo governors. The leaders welcomed Torrez's move, saying that many students who have graduated over the last five years were unable to reap the benefits of any changes.
"Now, my hope is that policies will finally be put in place and education programs will be developed, along with recurring funding, so that our children get the education they richly deserve both now and in the future," said Randall Vicente, the governor of Acoma Pueblo and a member of the All Pueblo Council of Governors.
Torrez, a Democrat, told the tribal leaders during their monthly meeting that the litigation — known as the Yazzie v. Martinez case — identified systemic issues within the state's education system and was monumental in setting a precedent for Native American and other minority students.
New Mexico historically has been at the bottom of the list when it comes to educational outcomes nationwide. Struggles to address lagging test scores and low graduation rates predated the coronavirus pandemic, and lawmakers have been pouring millions of dollars into efforts to boost access to broadband across the rural state as a way to get more students connected to the services they need.
The attorney general's office confirmed Tuesday that Torrez and members of his civil rights team already have met with lawyers representing the plaintiffs, including the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty, and the advocates and experts who helped draft a plan for meeting the needs of Native students.
Preliminary discussions also included Lujan Grisham, a Democrat who initially sought to have the case dismissed in 2020. Lujan Grisham has since defended her administration, saying progress has been made. That includes adding more classroom time to the school year, paying teachers more, providing free school lunches and creating an office dedicated to special education.
New Mexico last summer partnered with the Navajo Nation, Nambé Pueblo and the Mescalero Apache Nation to expand pre-K programs. The governor said at the time she wanted all 3- and 4-year-olds to have access to early education no matter where they lived.
Still, Native American leaders have complained that legislative efforts and funding allocations to address the public education system's deficiencies have been piecemeal. The state Public Education Department also has yet to finalize its own plan to address the ongoing education lawsuit after soliciting public comment in the summer of 2022.
It's too early to say what effects the attorney general's intervention might have, but advocates said they are willing to work with anyone from the state to get results for students.
Other plaintiffs include low-income students and those learning English as a second language.
Advocates have been talking with students, parents and teachers from different New Mexico communities and hearing similar stories about teacher shortages, scarce resources, limited technology and internet access, and not enough culturally relevant instructional materials.
"For years the state has wasted resources on a legal defense that's protecting the current system, instead of deeply examining and getting to the root of the problems to fix things," Melissa Candelaria, an attorney and the education director at the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty, said in a statement.
Santa Fe school board votes not to limit Fiesta Court's school visits- Santa Fe New Mexican, KUNM News
The Santa Fe Public Schools board voted against a proposal Monday that would have prohibited the Fiesta Court from participating in school events. The proposed compromise would have allowed only after-school campus visits.
The Santa Fe New Mexican reports the 3-2 vote against the measure proposed by Superintendent Hilario “Larry” Chavez followed five hours of comments from people in the community.
The Fiesta Court dramatizes the re-entry into Santa Fe by Spanish governor Don Diego de Vargas in 1692 after the Pueblo Revolt.
Those opposing the measure called it an attack on Hispanic heritage. Supporters say Fiesta is a celebration of colonialism and bringing it into classrooms harms Indigenous students.
Some of the 100 people who spoke at the meeting said there was insufficient time for public feedback and criticized what they saw as a lack of transparency.
Students who do not wish to participate in Fiesta events have the option to opt out.
Child testifies against former APS teacher in sexual assault trial - Albuquerque Journal, KUNM News
The first of several trials started this week for a former Albuquerque elementary school teacher accused of sexually abusing five students from 2013-2019.
The Albuquerque Journal reports a 12-year-old took the stand in district court today. The child said Danny Aldez repeatedly sexually assaulted her when he was her second grade teacher at Valle Vista Elementary School.
Aldez faces five felony charges in the case, including two counts each of criminal sexual penetration and criminal sexual contact — both of a child under 13. He’s also charged with bribery of a witness for telling the child not to tell anyone about the assaults.
The former APS teacher’s attorney, Alexandra Jones, said in her opening statement that prosecutors lack physical evidence and that the child’s accounting of the abuse includes “inconsistencies.”
Second Judicial District Attorney Sam Bregman told the jury his team has “more than enough evidence” to convict Aldaz for repeatedly abusing the child in a classroom closet.
He faces 27 additional felony counts in the other child sexual abuse cases — all of which will get their own trial.
Aldez also previously taught at Edward Gonzales Elementary, Helen Cordero Elementary and Blissful Spirits yoga studio.
Indigenous women navigate abortion access hurdles post-Roe - Noel Lyn Smith and Maddy Keyes, News21 via Source New Mexico
Rachael Lorenzo calls it their “auntie laugh,” a powerful chuckle that lasts long and fills any space. Aunties are prominent figures in Indigenous culture who offer comfort when one needs help.
Aunties answer the phone when no one else does.
That’s what Lorenzo, who is Mescalero Apache, Laguna and Xicana, does as founder of Indigenous Women Rising, a national fund that covers the costs of abortions – and the traditional ceremonies that follow – for Indigenous people.
Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade a year ago, demand for the organization’s services has skyrocketed. The group funded 37 abortions in 2019, 600 in 2022 and over 300 in the first six months of this year. From January to June, it’s spent more to help people than in all of 2022.
“We’re investing more money into … airfare, bus, gas, child care, elder care, after care for the individual who’s getting an abortion,” Lorenzo said. “If there are special needs that they have, we do our best to fund that, as well.”
Abortion was never readily available to Native Americans, thanks to a federal law that has prohibited nearly all abortions at Indian Health Service clinics since 1976. That’s always meant traveling long distances for the procedure.
But now states with some of the largest Indigenous populations also have some of the strictest restrictions on abortion: places like North and South Dakota and Oklahoma, home to the Cherokee Nation, the second-largest tribe in the U.S. with over 300,000 enrolled members.
Across the country, some 2 million Native Americans live in the 20 states with laws on the books banning abortion at 18 weeks of pregnancy or earlier, according to a News21 analysis.
“There are clinics closing, providers moving out of those states that we have served or serve, and so we’re seeing more people need to travel from very rural states in order to get abortion care,” Lorenzo said.
Add into the mix disproportionate rates of sexual assault and unintended pregnancy, a crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, high rates of maternal mortality, and poor access to preventative care and contraception, and the end of Roe has made a bad situation much worse.
“Roe has never been accessible for Native women,” said Lauren van Schilfgaarde, a tribal law specialist at UCLA. “When you add in the rates of violence and the complete gutting of tribal governments’ abilities to respond, you have a real dangerous recipe in which Native women have a lack of reproductive health.”
“Dobbs has exacerbated that,” van Schilfgaarde said.
The federal government provides health care to Native people as part of the treaty agreements for seized land. Those living on tribal lands or in big cities can use the Indian Health Service, or IHS, a federal agency that covers 2.6 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives across 574 federally recognized tribes.
However, the system is perpetually underfunded, forcing facilities to limit services.
On tribal lands, the clinics can be hours away by car – a trek that comes with a price tag for Native Americans, a quarter of whom live in poverty. And once they arrive, the clinic may or may not have gynecological or obstetric services.
Reproductive health care has always been “the lowest-hanging fruit for budget cuts,” said van Schilfgaarde, who is Cochiti.
The Hyde Amendment further restricted reproductive access for Indigenous women.
First approved by Congress in 1976, it banned the use of federal funds for abortion except to save the life of the mother. Exceptions were later added for rape and incest.
Yet exceptions at IHS facilities are rarely granted, even though Indigenous women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped than other women in the U.S., and some 34% of Native American women report having been raped at some point in their lives.
A study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that from 1981 to 2001, IHS performed 25 abortions. Another 2002 study found that 85% of IHS facilities did not have abortion services available or did not refer to abortion providers – even for women in permitted circumstances.
Dr. Antoinette Martinez, who is Chumash, is an obstetrics provider at United Indian Health Services, a federally funded clinic serving reservations in Humboldt and Del Norte, two northern California counties.
She can’t provide abortions because of the Hyde Amendment and has seen firsthand the effect of that.
“It really does create another hoop for young and middle-age Native women who do not desire pregnancy, who live either in a rural area or in a remote area,” she said. “Sometimes they come down from three hours away for care.”
In Oklahoma City, Trust Women was a go-to clinic for Indigenous patients seeking abortion care in a state where nearly 10% of the population is Indigenous. The state now has a strict abortion ban, and the facility’s treatment rooms hold unused chairs and boxes of medical supplies stacked in a corner.
States neighboring Oklahoma also have restrictive abortion policies. New Mexico is the nearest state that allows unrestricted abortion, and it’s an eight-hour drive away.
“It’s obviously a really egregious violation of people’s rights and dignity to not be able to access health care where they live,” said Kailey Voellinger, former clinic director of Trust Women in Oklahoma City.
Lorenzo founded Indigenous Women Rising after their own emergency abortion 10 years ago. At the time, they were a 23-year-old graduate student and parent to a toddler. The doctor told Lorenzo they had an unviable pregnancy but would have to “wait it out.”
Lorenzo figured there must be other Native people with similar experiences who needed help.
Jonnette Paddy, a member of the Navajo Nation, oversees the organization’s abortion fund and said that post-Roe, most states served are those with abortion restrictions.
“So we assist in Arizona. We assist in Oklahoma, North and South Dakota, Texas,” Paddy said.
In just the first six months of 2023, the fund has distributed $180,000 to support patients. That’s compared with $110,000 in all of 2022.
Indigenous Women Rising is one of the bigger community groups in the abortion realm but not the only one.
Following an outbreak of youth suicides in Indian Country in 2015, Sarah Adams, who is Choctaw and lives in Moore, Oklahoma, co-founded Matriarch to provide suicide prevention education and resources to the community.
Today, the organization provides critical services – including help with abortion care – that the tribal government is unable or unwilling to provide. Its members help people schedule appointments at out-of-state abortion clinics, fund procedures and assist with child care and meals.
Adams noted that the lack of abortion access for Indigenous women has not even come up among most tribal leadership, which is predominantly male.
After Roe was overturned, the Suquamish Tribe in Washington state was the only one to speak out publicly, issuing a statement saying, “Our bodily integrity and our right to make decisions over whether or when we bear children are foundational to human dignity.”
“We’ve always known that the community is really the only thing that is protecting us, and that we’ll find a way,” Adams said. “We’ll find ways to make sure that we get the health care that we need.”
This report is part of “America After Roe,” an examination of the impact of the reversal of Roe v. Wade on health care, culture, policy and people, produced by Carnegie-Knight News21. For more stories, visit https://americaafterroe.news21.com/.
ABQ chief administrative officer to retire after 30+ years - KUNM News
Albuquerque’s chief administrative officer is set to retire after more than 30 years in public service.
According to a press release from Mayor Tim Keller’s office, Lawrence Rael will step down this November and Samantha Sengel, a long-time Vice President at Central New Mexico Community College will transition into the role.
Describing Rael as a “de facto city manager” the release credits him with serving under four city mayors which earned him the title of longest serving chief administrative officer in the city’s history.
Before his time at the mayor’s office, Rael also worked on projects like the Rail Runner, the Isotopes Park, improvements to the Zoo, Botanic Gardens and Aquarium, and the Explora Science Center.
Samantha Sengel’s appointment to the position still needs to be confirmed by the City Council.
New trail opens in the Sandia Mountains - Albuquerque Journal, KUNM News
A new trail has opened in the Sandia Mountains.
As the Albuquerque Journal reports the “Challenge Trail” recently got a new look after its renovation in the Carson National Forest.
Work on the trail started in the spring of 2021 and took about 100 volunteers from various organizations to get it done. Work wrapped up in mid-August.
Originally, the Challenge Trail roughly followed N.M. Highway 536 and started from the Ellis Trailhead to the Sandia Peak Ski Area.
Now, with this recent extension, the trail extends from the base of the downhill ski area down to Bill’s Spring Trail.
According to volunteers, the full Challenge Trail is about 10 miles with 3,300 feet of elevation gain.
Former MDC employee alleges she was pushed out for calling out excessive force - Albuquerque Journal, KUNM News
A former employee of the state’s largest jail alleges in a lawsuit that she was pushed out of her job for attempting to hold officers accountable for using excessive force.
The Albuquerque Journal reports Priscilla Torres sat on two panels at the Metropolitan Detention Center meant to identify incidents of force that went too far.
She says in the whistleblower suit that violence at the jail increased when Corrections Emergency Response Team officers were brought in last fall to fill vacancies but, despite this, “little to no reporting was conducted.”
The incidents included a CERT officer tasing a person in the shower multiple times. Another resulted in the death of John Sanchez after an officer slammed his head while he was handcuffed, breaking his neck and back and causing his brain to bleed.
The suit against MDC, its warden and others allege that Torres’ complaints about officers not being disciplined for violent acts were either ignored or processed so slowly that nothing came of them. She said her requests for reviews by higher-ups also went nowhere.
She accuses jail leadership of retaliating against her for the complaints by removing her from her posts without explanation or warning and giving her extra work to do.
She is seeking compensatory and other damages.
FEMA changes wildfire compensation rules for New Mexicans affected by last year's historic blaze - Associated Press
The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced changes Monday to its wildfire compensation rules after a planned burn by the U.S. Forest Service last year exploded into the largest and most destructive blaze in New Mexico's recorded history.
FEMA officials said they are expanding coverage for those affected by Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon Fire for mental health treatment and reduced long-term property values, and removing the 25% cap on reforestation and revegetation costs, and on risk-reduction practices.
The changes stem from legislation that U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján and other members of New Mexico's congressional delegation helped get passed in 2022.
The legislation also established a claims office within FEMA that Luján said has secured $3.95 billion for New Mexico families and businesses affected by the wildfire.
"The federal government started these fires and now it has a moral obligation to help New Mexicans who were impacted," Luján said in a statement Monday.
The Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon Fire burned more than 533 square miles (2.5 square kilometers) in Taos, Mora and San Miguel counties between early April and late June of 2022.
Authorities said an improperly extinguished Forest Service pile burn operation rekindled and merged with another wildfire, destroying about 900 structures, including several hundred homes.