Amid parent backlash, APS keeps AI reading program with changes - Natalia Robbins, Albuquerque Journal
Amid mounting pressure to dump the software, leaders at Albuquerque Public Schools said Wednesday the district will continue to use the contentious artificial intelligence reading program Amira, but will scale back voice recordings and increase data deletion amid student privacy concerns.
Amira works by listening to students read aloud, noting incorrect pronunciations and scoring their performance. The program has been required for use by the state Public Education Department since the beginning of the 2025-26 school year and is used both for regular assessments and weekly tutoring.
In a letter to parents, APS Deputy Superintendent Randy Mahlerwein said Amira’s leadership provided documentation certifying that all voice data from before the current school year had been deleted. Data from Amira’s testing feature will be deleted every 48 hours so teachers have a chance to listen to the recordings, and Amira’s tutoring component will continue to score and analyze student voices but will not record them.
The move comes after parents showed up en masse at school board meetings across the state, asking district leaders to reconsider using the program, worried about where their children’s data goes and who sees it.
As the school year starts across New Mexico, several districts have already opted out of the PED requirement in favor of non-AI programs. Since the beginning of the month, 15 of the state’s 89 districts and one charter school have refused the program, some temporarily until further guidance is available, according to PED spokesperson Janelle Taylor García.
APS — the state’s largest district — has maintained that it will continue to use the program, even in the face of mounting parental discontent, citing the progress its students have made using Amira.
Parents who don’t want their children to use Amira can opt for a paper-and-pencil test, Mahlerwein said.
The program was approved for use after the non-AI software provider schools had been using for testing, Istation, was acquired by the San Francisco-based company Amira Learning in 2024.
New Mexico spends $2.7 million on Amira yearly for software use, professional development, data analysis and other additional tutoring and support programs, Amira leadership told the Journal. The cost of the statewide assessment alone is $1.4 million.
Amira is required for assessments in two states — New Mexico and Idaho — and is authorized for state use in Oklahoma, Georgia, California, Texas, Michigan and Massachusetts.
The concerns about Amira, it seems, are spreading to state government. On Monday, a group of more than 30 lawmakers from both sides of the aisle signed a letter addressed to PED Secretary Mariana Padilla, requesting that the agency ask for parental consent before using Amira and provide the public information about its functionality.
“You’re talking about the biometric data of children 5 to 8 years old,” said Rep. Linda Serrato, D-Santa Fe, who led the group of signatories. “That’s valuable stuff, and we know it, but we have to treat it as such.”
Serrato said she worries about the consequences of not teaching children AI literacy when they interact with Amira, who appears on students’ screens as a friendly purple-haired cartoon character in glasses.
“Our job right now is to be teaching every level of New Mexican, whether they’re children all the way up to our elders, just what AI is and what it isn’t,” she said. “My concern is that it really is humanizing this tool.”
Serrato said building stronger guidance for AI is a top priority at the next legislative session in January.
“As public servants, our job is to operate as transparently about things that the public has questions on as possible,” she said.
Taylor García said in a statement the PED had received the letter and that the agency “welcomes the opportunity to discuss these matters with the Legislature and to partner in creating clear safeguards, strong accountability measures, and transparent communication with families.”
“The department will continue evaluating emerging technologies to ensure they are used responsibly, securely, and in the best interest of New Mexico students,” she said.
Lawmakers also wrote of anxieties surrounding “model drift,” the decline in an AI product’s functioning or accuracy after it is launched to the public as it adapts to user behavior.
“The unfortunate reality is that once children’s voices and other real-world data are used to train the model and influence its future output, the system’s behavior and performance can change,” the letter reads.
Amira CEO Mark Angel maintains that this is not an issue with the program, which does use student voices to “train” its performance, since the assessment does not change from the beginning of a school year to the end.
“This is a complete misunderstanding,” Angel said. “If anyone on the Senate team or staff had talked to us, we would have explained that any concern about model drift does not impact Amira’s ability to accurately assess students. And I think if people think about it, we’re approved by more than 30 state agencies. If there was any truth to what they’re asserting, no state agency would be willing to rely on our data.”
Amira does collect student data, but only under direction from the PED, so the state can produce its reading performance reports, Angel said.
“We don’t want to collect this data; it’s a nuisance,” he said. “If the Legislature or PED tells us to stop collecting the data, we will stop instantaneously.”
Recordings are stored so that teachers can listen back to them to hear student progress, Angel said, so a 48-hour deletion window means teachers have less time to listen to the recordings.
“People are confused about this. They think that we are keeping this audio because it’s serving some interior purpose,” he said. “It’s actually serving the exterior purpose of helping teachers to benefit from the assessment process.”
Angel insists the company does not sell or transmit data to any other agency or company.
“We have contractual obligations, civil penalties from the Federal Trade Commission, and legal responsibilities to a wide range of government agencies that make it almost an absurdity to imagine that we would do something both as immoral or as suicidal as sell or provide this data,” he said.
New Mexico sues feds, contractors over water wells drilled to aid border wall construction - Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Wednesday announced a lawsuit against the U.S. government and its contractors over unauthorized water wells that federal agencies used to construct a wall along the state’s border with Mexico.
The New Mexico Office of the State Engineer had previously documented multiple sites in protected underground water basins and cited federal subcontractors for drilling wells without state authorization. The office also alleged that contractors’ failure to construct or plug wells properly had created an “imminent risk of groundwater contamination.”
A news release from the governor’s office announcing the lawsuit from Wednesday names as defendants the subcontractors, Wyatt Drilling Arizona, LLC, and Cascade Drilling, LP., as well as their prime contractor, Montana-based Barnard Construction Company. It also names the United States of America.
A copy of the lawsuit was not immediately available in court records, because court staff were still processing it as of late Wednesday afternoon, according to Leah March, a spokesperson for the governor’s office. Source NM has a pending request to the governor’s office for the name of the federal agency being sued.
“Water is a precious resource in New Mexico, and the residents, ranchers, and farmers whose water is being stolen by the federal government deserve justice,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement.
Officials from Barnard Construction and Cascade Drilling did not immediately respond to Source NM’s calls and emails seeking comment Wednesday afternoon. Vincent Wyatt, owner of Wyatt Drilling, declined to comment.
The lawsuit adds a new allegation against the contractors and the federal entity that hired them, according to a news release from the governor’s office. The lawsuit claims “improper tampering” with a water meter, an illegal practice that state officials said can obscure the amount of water diverted from a wall.
A copy of the lawsuit was not immediately available in court records, because court staff were still processing it as of late Wednesday afternoon, according to Leah March, a spokesperson for the governor’s office.
But State Engineer Elizabeth Anderson said in a statement that the lawsuit aims to ensure that the state’s permit procedures are followed and that the federal government pays for any water it was not authorized to take.
“Our permit procedures exist to protect water rights holders, and we are not going to allow the federal government to evade those protections and threaten our groundwater,” Anderson said. “We are also demanding double repayment for all illegally diverted groundwater.”
Crews respond to 6 small wildfires in Carson National Forest following 11,000 lightning strikes - John Miller, Albuquerque Journal
Lightning strikes continue to be a major cause of wildfires in New Mexico this summer, with a string of six small fires reported in the Carson National Forest this week as containment work continues on the 15,200-acre Frijoles Fire.
Forest Service firefighters responded to the small fires in the Carson after an estimated 11,000 lightning strikes slashed northern New Mexico this week, according to Carson National Forest spokesperson Zach Behrens.
While firefighters quickly contained four of the small fires, two were still burning as of Wednesday.
The largest, the Cruces Basin Fire, was estimated at 36 acres Wednesday at the northern edge of the Cruces Basin Wilderness, a few miles south of the New Mexico-Colorado border.
Smokejumpers and Rio Grande National Forest firefighters responded to the wildfire after it was reported Tuesday afternoon. Carson National Forest crews and two helicopters are now fighting the blaze, which is “smoldering and creeping” but flared up Tuesday afternoon due to powerful outflow winds from nearby thunderstorms.
While lightning is the suspected cause, the Forest Service has yet to confirm the exact cause of the Cruces Basin Fire.
Firefighters were also on scene at the 1-acre Jarita Canyon Fire, which is exhibiting smoldering and creeping behavior to the southwest in Vallecitos in Rio Arriba County.
The small blazes come in the wake of the much larger Frijoles Fire, which stood at 15,252 acres and 55% containment as of Wednesday.
A multiagency team of in-state and national crew members helping to contain the fire reached nearly 1,000 in number before the Forest Service announced it was gradually decreasing resources dedicated to the fire this week, signaling good progress in containing the late-season wildfire.
The Frijoles Fire was first reported on Aug. 4 after lightning strikes in the Pecos Wilderness Area of Santa Fe National Forest. The blaze threatened several small communities on its western and northern flanks this month and dispersed thick smoke into many communities throughout the north-central region.
Just under 800 firefighting and support personnel are still on scene at the fire, completing fireline on the north side of the Pecos Wilderness within the Truchas Land Grant and cleaning up spot fires north of the Rio Nambe.
The U.S. Wildland Fire Service identified a support crew member who died during a medical incident Sunday at the Frijoles Fire as Randy Lupe, a 62-year-old from Arizona’s San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation.
While lightning strikes from late-summer thunderstorms kept fire teams on high alert in New Mexico this month, nearly 100 major wildfires are still burning in other states throughout the Western U.S.
A total of 148 new fires, including 14 new large wildfires, were reported in the U.S. on Tuesday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, with 22,356 firefighters and support personnel assigned to incidents nationwide.
Revenue estimate: High oil prices due to Iran war mean $924 million in ‘new’ money for New Mexico – Dan Boyd, Albuquerque Journal
A simmering military conflict more than 7,000 miles away is driving New Mexico revenue collections to unprecedented levels.
Due in large part to high oil prices connected to the U.S.-Iran war, New Mexico is projected to take in $14.8 billion in revenue during the coming budget year, according to new estimates released Wednesday.
That means lawmakers — and the state’s next governor — could have $924.2 million in “new” money to spend in the coming year, though uncertain economic conditions could cause that amount to fluctuate. New money represents the difference between current total spending and projected revenue.
“Times are great right now, but they won’t always be great,” Rep. Derrick Lente, D-Sandia Pueblo, said during a Wednesday meeting of the Legislative Finance Committee in Farmington.
The surging revenue levels — the projected revenue amount for this year is $618 million higher than it was in December — could also mean hefty infusions into several state trust funds established in recent years. That includes an early childhood trust fund that’s been tapped to help pay for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s universal child care initiative.
Already, the state has roughly $75 billion invested in its various endowment funds, most of which provide yearly distributions to help pay for public schools and other state programs.
“That additional funding is now flowing into our savings accounts,” state Taxation and Revenue Secretary Stephanie Schardin Clarke told lawmakers during Wednesday’s hearing.
However, state officials also cautioned the surging revenue levels could obscure trouble spots in New Mexico’s economy.
That includes high inflation rates and a labor force participation rate of 56.9% as of June, a figure that remains below the state’s pre-pandemic peak, according to LFC data.
Legislative Finance Committee Chief Economist Ismael Torres said the state’s economy is “struggling to find its footing” but has shown resilience amid uncertainty over tariffs and federal government spending.
He also said nearly 40% of the state’s total general fund revenue stems from sources that are not a direct tax burden on New Mexicans — namely investment income and oil and gas revenues. Without those revenue sources, state taxes on residents would have to be higher in order to maintain current spending levels, Torres said.
Meanwhile, New Mexico’s ongoing revenue growth comes as several other western states are weathering budget shortfalls.
In neighboring Colorado, for instance, lawmakers were forced to cut Medicaid provider rates and enact other cost-saving measures earlier this year in response to a budget crunch.
Revenue windfall could prompt debate
New Mexico’s latest revenue surge — revenue levels have more than doubled since 2018 — could reignite a debate at the Roundhouse over how the money should be spent.
High gas prices prompted Lujan Grisham last month to propose rebates of $250 per taxpayer. But that plan has gotten a tepid response from gubernatorial candidates — Democrat Deb Haaland and Republican Gregg Hull — and many state lawmakers.
Instead, GOP legislators, along with some Democrats, have proposed the more drastic step of eliminating the state’s personal income tax code to provide lasting financial relief to taxpayers.
There arecurrently nine states that do not have an income tax system, including Texas, Nevada and South Dakota.
“I’m just wondering when we have enough in our coffers to decide that New Mexico’s working citizens and retirees that have disposable income are worthy of having the ability to stay in our state,” Rep. Rebecca Dow, R-Truth or Consequences, said during Wednesday’s hearing. “It just doesn’t seem like it’s ever enough.”
But Schardin Clarke argued against such a move, saying a repeal of the personal income tax code would primarily benefit New Mexico’s wealthiest residents and would also eliminate various tax breaks intended to help low-income families.
A 2025 bill that sought to repeal the state’s personal income tax would have eventually cost the state more than $4 billion per year in forgone revenue, according to a legislative analysis.
Meanwhile, prices at the pump remain high for New Mexico commuters, with a statewide average price of $4.06 per gallon as of Wednesday, according to AAA data.
Outgoing governor’s cash drawdown
While Lujan Grisham will step down at the end of this year after concluding her second term as governor, she could still have an impact on next year’s budget decisions.
That’s because the Democratic governor has issued a deluge of executive orders, primarily in response to wildfires and floods across New Mexico, that have reduced the amount of money available for other purposes.
That includes 12 orders issued this month in response to the Frijoles Fire in northern New Mexico that, combined, have authorized nearly $9 million in emergency spending.
With the governor already having authorized the spending of roughly $155 million this year via executive order, that means the amount of new money available to lawmakers next year could be reduced accordingly, Torres said.
The Lujan Grisham administration is not expected to issue a budget plan for the coming year before the governor leaves office, but the governor said Wednesday the state was positioned for success.
“New Mexico planned for this by building reserves when times were good and investing in programs that help improve the lives of New Mexicans, including universal child care, expanded health care access and enhanced educational opportunities,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “We made sure that the next administration inherits a state that’s financially sound.”
Whoever is elected as New Mexico’s next governor will take office just weeks before the start of next year’s 60-day legislative session, during which lawmakers will be tasked with approving a new state budget.
New Mexico immigrant advocates warn of ‘uptick’ in ICE arrests in Albuquerque – Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
Members of New Mexico immigration advocacy groups and local elected officials warned Wednesday that they’ve seen a sharp increase in federal immigration arrests in Albuquerque in recent days.
Within the last week or so, group leaders said they’ve received far more phone calls than usual from relatives of Albuquerque residents arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
At a news conference Wednesday, members of one such organization, El Centro de Igualdad y Derechos, read anonymous testimonials from four Albuquerque residents recounting the impacts of ICE arrests of their family members Aug. 21.
Leaders of El Centro and New Mexico Immigrant Law Center told Source NM on Wednesday that they do not have an estimate of exactly how many people ICE may have arrested in the city in recent days, but they’re certain ICE has stepped up arrests based on the increase in calls to their respective organizations.
El Centro’s Fabiola Landeros, an immigrant rights organizer, told Source NM her organization has heard from approximately eight family members in the last week; Emily Alvarez, community response coordinator at the Immigrant Law Center said her organization has heard from approximately six family members recently.
“It’s a huge uptick,” Alvarez told Source NM. “We’re dealing with fuzzy numbers, like I’m not able to say exactly, but I think it’s probably the biggest surge in enforcement we’ve seen in our state” since President Donald Trump began his second term in January 2025.
An ICE spokesperson did not immediately respond to Source NM’s request for comment Wednesday.
ICE periodically releases detention data that gives some insight into its arrest activity, including snapshots of detainee populations at facilities in New Mexico and elsewhere. The agency’s most recent data release regarding its July activities shows the agency detained 51,000 people, the highest monthly total during Trump’s second term.
Albuquerque resident Marisol Meyer-DrioVínto shared a video of what she said was one such ICE arrest Sunday morning in Albuquerque, in which ICE officers in unmarked vehicles and masks pulled over a man driving a work truck around 8:30 a.m. in a tree-lined neighborhood.
The reported ICE activity in Albuquerque in recent days follows reports of increased arrests last week in Santa Fe, where advocates said ICE arrested as many as 16 people over the course of several days. Those arrests prompted outcry from local and federal elected officials, as well as a local protest.
During the news conference Wednesday, Albuquerque City Councilor Stephanie Telles touted the city’s ordinance aimed at protecting immigrants from being arrested in sensitive places like clinics or hospitals and ICE from using city resources to make arrests. She said she has also heard from constituents about an uptick in ICE activity.
“We’re not seeing big raids throughout the city, but we are hearing again and again about cars with blackened windows following our family members throughout the city, with the intent to intimidate and to strike fear,” she said.
US Rep. Vasquez backs 2 federal data center bills as developments come under scrutiny in New Mexico – Joshua Bowling, Source New Mexico
U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) on Tuesday announced he had co-sponsored two federal bills aimed at data center transparency.
Vasquez signed on as a co-sponsor to the FAIR Data Act, sponsored by Rep. Josh Riley (D-N.Y.), and the Data Center Water and Energy Transparency Act of 2026, sponsored by Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-IL).
The FAIR Data Act would shield residential electric customers and small businesses from shouldering increased energy costs related to large data centers. The Data Center Water and Energy Transparency Act of 2026 would require developers to provide state and local governments that have data centers, or are considering them, with information pertaining to energy and water consumption. Companies that don’t comply would face fines of up to $20,000 per day.
“New Mexico’s water, air and resources belong to us, not to billionaires from coastal states who see an opportunity to extract profit from our land,” Vasquez said in a statement. “I’ve been appalled at the backroom deals, silencing of dissenting voices, shady NDAs and shell companies, and the overall lack of transparency from those who seek to do business in our state.”
Vasquez’s announcement came one day after his cCongressional colleague U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) sent a letter to several state agencies demanding detailed information about water usage for Project Jupiter, the Oracle and OpenAI data center under construction in southern New Mexico, which lies in the 2nd Congressional District Vasquez represents.
The only direct mention of Project Jupiter in Vasquez’s announcement was a reference to his July condemnation of a security guard’s use of physical force at a Doña Ana County meeting where residents protested against the development.
Earlier this year, Vasquez called on elected officials in a small New Mexico county to adopt a data center moratorium as a Canadian tech CEO sought to build a massive data center and solar array in their community.
Source NM reported that neither Green Data nor its CEO, Jason Bak, had ever successfully built a data center. Yet Bak’s company sought to build on 10,000 acres in partnership with New Mexico Tech, the local university.
County commissioners ultimately adopted the moratorium and New Mexico Tech nixed the deal, in large part because it didn’t have enough contiguous land to host the development.
“New Mexico should absolutely compete for the jobs and technology of the future, but we are not going to sell out our water, our clean air or our way of life to do it,” Vasquez said in his Tuesday statement. “If you want to do business here, you need to be transparent, listen to local residents, and most importantly, prove to New Mexicans that projects will serve, not steal from, our communities.”
