As the afternoon bell rang at Lybrook Elementary/Mid School in Counselor, Amari Werito and his brother, Azarius, jogged to the Chevy truck where their father, Billton Werito, waited to drive them home.
Pickup time is always tense. As the boys climbed into the back seat, the usual questions dogged their father. Was the food in the cafeteria safe to eat? Did the boys have the books and school supplies they needed? Did they fall behind in class?
“Today was OK, I guess,” said Amari, who is in seventh grade, as his father’s truck pulled out of the school parking lot. Then, looking up after a pause, “I think this school could be better. I think all the money goes to the other schools.”
That suspicion lies at the heart of a fraught dynamic at Jemez Mountain Schools, a small district in southwestern Rio Arriba County that serves 175 students. The 68 Navajo students at Lybrook bring their district hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding each year, — $381,000 in fiscal year 2025 — money meant to help Indigenous students.
Yet, year after year, Lybrook has lacked even the most basic academic support and supplies, according to parents and teachers. Families and school staff believe the money received for Lybrook students is instead going to other schools in the district, whose student populations are almost entirely non-Native.
Most anywhere else, parents of students at troubled schools would have opportunities to figure out where their students’ funding is going themselves. They could run for school board, or vote in school board elections. Native American parents could serve in legally mandated committees to oversee federal Indian Education funding.
Not at Lybrook.
The school’s prekindergarten through eighth grade students — nearly all of whom are Navajo — live in the Counselor Chapter of the Navajo Nation, an area that lies just outside the school district’s boundary. As a result, Werito and other Navajo parents at Lybrook are not allowed to participate as candidates or voters in school board elections.
The district suspended parents of Lybrook students from two parent-led Indian Education oversight committees in 2024, and those committees remain without representation from that school. State reports, meanwhile, show the district has failed to consult with tribal parents and officials on its education of Indigenous students.
“The district is happy to take the money for our kids, but they absolutely will not show us how they spend that money,” Werito said as he drove his kids down a bumpy dirt road, winding between sagebrush and mesas, to the family’s home on the Navajo Nation.
“Meanwhile our kids see the other schools getting new computers, better buses, a beautiful, fancy gymnasium. And they ask me all the time, ‘Why do the other schools get treated so well and we just get the scraps?’ ”
The current superintendent for Jemez Mountain Schools, Loren Cushman, said in a statement that state law requires school board members to reside within the school district’s boundaries.
“Many of our students do not reside in our district,” said Cushman, who was hired as superintendent in 2025. “However, we are fortunate to have a school board who understands their responsibility to represent all of our students and their families, and serve in their best interest.”
Cushman said that while the parent advisory committees were put on a “short hiatus,” those committees were reinstated with consultation and assistance from tribal officials and state and federal education agencies.
“The district implemented major changes to rebuild partnerships with local tribal leadership and increase collaboration with the Lybrook and surrounding communities,” Cushman said.
So far, academic success has been out of reach for many students at Lybrook.
One in five students are proficient in math and reading, and one in three are chronically absent, according to recent state data. The school does not have its own counselor, according to parents and employees, relying instead on periodic visits from employees housed at another school campus in Gallina.
Gas fumes waft over Lybrook from nearby wellheads, sometimes causing students to develop headaches and nosebleeds, scientific and health studies have found. With no dedicated nurse, students who feel ill often have nobody to tend to them.
Amari’s seventh grade class has spent the year taught not by a certified teacher, but by an educational assistant. Paper, glue, pencils and other supplies are scarce. The school’s buses have broken down on numerous occasions, leaving students stranded and parents frantic.
“I was just in shock when I started teaching there,” said Alicia Chapman, who taught fourth and fifth grade at Lybrook before leaving in 2024. “The school is serving spoiled milk and expired food. Teachers are spending their own money on supplies for their students. The library is a complete disaster — the books are outdated and scattered everywhere, out of order. The school is supposed to have money to fix these things, but nothing ever changes.”
Superintendent Cushman said “all teachers and classrooms in the district are provided with adequate school supplies and materials.” Cushman said he was not aware of any expired or spoiled food being served to students.
Federal funding questions
Federal funding for Jemez Mountain Schools’ Indigenous students accounts for only about 7% of the district’s $5.3 million in annual revenue, according to federal data. Nevertheless, parents say it should be making a meaningful difference in improving conditions at Lybrook.
Like all school districts, Jemez Mountain Schools has wide latitude in deciding how to allocate its budget. In court documents, former interim superintendent Roselyn Carroll said in 2025 the funding awarded for Lybrook’s Navajo students was “shared” with other schools in the district. But while some districts publish detailed, school-by-school financial breakdowns, Jemez Mountain Schools has not provided such clarity when asked by attorneys, oversight committees and journalists.
In January 2025, the New Mexico chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed public records requests seeking documents detailing the money received and spent for Native American education at Jemez Mountain Schools. That records request remains unfulfilled.
“It should be easy to produce these budgetary documents,” said Preston Sanchez, an ACLU attorney involved in the records requests. “Where there’s smoke there’s probably fire. I don’t think that they want the public to know about their process for monitoring and tracking monies for the district as it relates to Native kids.”
Cushman, the district’s superintendent, said Jemez Mountain Schools “has and will continue to provide detailed breakdowns” of its funding for Native American education. “The district is complying on these expenditures,” he said. “Compliance is an ongoing process, and I remain committed to continuous examination of how funding is utilized across the district.”
Searchlight requested these documents after Cushman’s written response but did not receive them by publication time.
The district received another court challenge in January 2026, this time by the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government. That petition alleged Jemez Mountain Schools had violated the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act by, among other things, “failing to produce or allow inspection of public records.”
The recent court actions are not the first time Jemez Mountain Schools’ finances — and its reluctance to share financial information — have been in the spotlight. In 2009, the Rio Grande Sun filed a lawsuit against the district over its refusal to fulfill public records requests for financial documents relating to a district employee who had embezzled more than $3 million meant for school buildings, educational supplies and teacher salaries. A judge decided in the newspaper’s favor and ordered the district to provide the documents.
District officials have denied money received for Native American students is being mishandled. In emails obtained by Searchlight, former interim superintendent Roselyn Carroll wrote in 2024 that “for years there have always been complaints about [federal Indian Education] funds being used inappropriately but there has never been any evidence to prove that.”
Recent audits and oversight reports, however, have only added to parents’ concerns.
A 2024 financial audit undertaken by an independent consulting firm found “material weakness and material noncompliance” in the district’s handling of its money from the federal Impact Aid program, awarded to schools with high numbers of students who live on tribal land.
A 2025 report by the New Mexico Public Education Department found that of the 27 school districts that qualify for Impact Aid, only Jemez Mountain Schools had failed to develop and implement legally required Federal Indian Policies and Procedures. (The state Public Education Department could not determine the status for one other district, Bernalillo Public Schools.) That report also found Jemez Mountain Schools had not consulted with District Indian Education Committees, parent advisory councils or tribal organizations about the education of its Indigenous students.
Another report published by the district in 2025 found Jemez Mountain Schools had violated rules governing Indian Education programs. None of the reports detailed how the district spent the money meant for its Navajo students.
A walkout and firings
Tensions over the problems at Lybrook reached a breaking point at the end of the 2024 school year, after parents learned a student was accused of bringing a gun to class and threatening another student. School leaders did not enact appropriate emergency protocols, parents and teachers say.
In court documents, district officials said they were not aware that a gun had been brought to school until a student told them about it several weeks later. However, district officials canceled school the following day and held a meeting with parents that same week.
The incident struck a nerve with parents, students and school staff, who had already been chafing at Lybrook’s lack of resources. There was no security guard to prevent or respond to dangerous incidents, and no full-time counselor to assist victims of bullying or students struggling with their mental health. Parents felt the school administration was brushing off their concerns.
Students began planning a walkout. A week after the incident with the gun, Amari Werito and more than a dozen other students stood up and left their classrooms, gathering in the parking lot in front of the school and holding brightly colored signs that read, “Keep us safe” and “Support our teachers.”
“They’re doing so much stuff for the school district but not for us,” one student said in a video posted on TikTok, as he and his classmates stood in front of the school. The kids had had enough, said another student, “because there was threats at the school and nobody felt safe and nobody is doing anything about it.”
The students, accompanied by Werito and a handful of other parents, set out toward the Counselor Chapter House, a tribal government building and community center nearly two miles away. As they walked along the busy shoulder of U.S. 550, cars passing by honked in support.
“These are just Native American kids trying to get an education and go to school,” the narrator of the TikTok video said. “They don’t care enough about our Native American kids to protect them. The school that these kids go to makes all the money” for the other schools in the district, she said.
The walkout threw the school district into crisis mode. Long-simmering tensions boiled over at a parent meeting called by the district the following school day, in which parents and teachers alike questioned the superintendent over the district’s treatment of students at Lybrook, according to parents and district employees present at the meeting.
Alicia Chapman, a fifth grade teacher at Lybrook, was among those questioning the then-superintendent, Felix Garcia.
“I asked him why we didn’t have a security guard or a counselor for these kids,” Chapman told Searchlight, a conversation later recounted in court documents. “He just said, that’s not in the budget.”
“Then maybe we should prioritize student safety in the budget,” Chapman responded.
After the exchange, Garcia called Chapman into a meeting. “You have a responsibility to the district, and one of those responsibilities is not to badmouth the district in front of parents,” he told her, in a conversation recorded by Chapman and shared with Searchlight.
“Parents already feel that we mismanaged their money. The parents don’t trust us,” he said, and staff should not make the situation worse by questioning the district’s expenditures.
The next school day, Chapman says she received two letters of reprimand. The day after that, she received notice that she was being terminated from her teaching position. Chapman has filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the district alleging wrongful termination.
After the walkout, the district filed licensure complaints against Chapman and two other teachers for participating in or assisting students with the walkout, according to court documents (Chapman says she was on medical leave at the time and was not involved in the walkout). At least one other teacher was fired after district officials determined they “did participate in the walkout and did put children in harm’s way,” the documents say.
“You are not allowed to ask questions about how the district spends money,” Chapman said. “They were sending a message with me — if you ask questions, this is what will happen.”
Committees suspended
The district soon moved to take further steps against those involved in the student walkout — including Werito and Heather Yazzie, parents who chaired two committees tasked with overseeing Native American education funding.
In their role as president and vice president of the Johnson O’Malley Committee, which oversaw another source of federal funding issued by the Bureau of Indian Education, Werito and Yazzie had repeatedly raised questions about what they said was a resource imbalance between Lybrook and the other schools in the district.
“Every time we had a committee meeting about the Indian Education money, the main concern we heard from parents was that they don’t know where the money is going,” Yazzie said.
“So we would ask for the district for documentation, and get no answer. We were basically just telling the district how they should spend the money, then getting no info about how it was actually being used.”
On July 23, 2024, Werito received an email from the district’s interim superintendent Roselyn Carroll: “The Johnson O’Malley Parent Committee is temporarily suspended due to the walk-out protest that occurred in May 2024,” the email read. Another advisory group chaired by Werito, the Parent Advisory Committee, would be suspended for the same reason.
Months later, the district issued Werito a no-trespass order, prohibiting him from entering school property, following what the superintendent described in court documents as aggressive questioning by Werito over the district’s treatment of Navajo students (the district has since rescinded that order).
The suspension of the parent advisory committees left Navajo parents — already barred from the school board — with no oversight or input into the district’s federal funding for Native American students.
It also raised questions with the New Mexico chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Preston Sanchez, an ACLU attorney, said in an interview that the district’s suspension of its Johnson O’Malley committee could violate federal statutes requiring tribal involvement in federal education funding for Native students. Sanchez is now representing Werito in a lawsuit alleging the district violated his First Amendment rights by suspending him from the parent committees and issuing him a trespass order.
“These are egregious problems,” Sanchez said. “This gets to a bigger issue beyond the money. The neglect of Native American students is something that has been historically a problem, and today we see an extension of that history being played out at this school district.”
Laura Castille, an attorney for the school district, wrote in an email the district could not comment because the litigation was ongoing. “The allegations made by the ACLU are false,” she wrote.
As students at Lybrook continue to struggle, local tribal officials have tried to help fill the gaps, said Samuel Sage, community service coordinator at the Counselor Chapter.
During the current school year, the chapter offered to arrange for a professor at Navajo Technical University, a tribal college in Crownpoint, to make regular trips to Lybrook for after-school tutoring. Also this school year, the chapter proposed an arrangement in which a retired special education teacher who had offered to volunteer at Lybrook would provide assistance to special needs students. Neither offer got a response from the district, Sage said.
Superintendent Cushman said in a statement to Searchlight that he is not aware of any offers to provide tutoring services. “The district welcomes this type of support,” he said.
“There needs to be more communication between the chapter and the district,” Sage said. “It’s frustrating, I think, for the parents and also mainly for the students. Because a lot of them, when they leave here, they’re totally lost.”
This article first appeared on Searchlight New Mexico.