New Mexico’s students are facing challenges both inside and outside the classroom that make learning difficult. A community school model that connects families with resources like healthy meals or mental health counseling is touted as a potential solution. On the next Let’s Talk New Mexico, we’ll discuss how community schools might help our floundering education system.

Social media has become a common way for people to communicate and share ideas. However, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory earlier this year about the effects of social media use on young people and their mental health after use of platforms has become nearly universal.

For more than two centuries, museums and universities have kept collections of Native American human remains in the name of science. A recent ProPublica report found that despite the promise of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), institutions have continued to hold and use indigenous remains in research projects aimed at things like dating cultivation of corn and showing when migration routes were active.

On the next Let’s Talk New Mexico we’ll check in on the return to the office and we’d like to hear from you. Are you still working from home, or are you back at the workplace fulltime? How has work-life changed?

Back to school season can be stressful for students and according to national statistics, kids in the U.S. are experiencing a mental health crisis. New Mexico ranks 47th in youth mental health, with about 1 in 5 kids experiencing depression. On the next Let’s Talk New Mexico, we’ll discuss how mental health is key to student success.

During the COVID pandemic, Congress required that Medicaid keep people continuously enrolled throughout the public health emergency order. But that order has ended and now nearly 60,000 New Mexicans have lost their health insurance. On the next Let’s Talk New Mexico, we’ll discuss how this unwinding process will impact health outcomes.

In New Mexico educational outcomes are low overall, and they’re even lower for special education. In May the Governor announced a new special education office to help improve those outcomes. On the next Let’s Talk New Mexico, we’ll discuss closing the achievement gap for special needs students.

Native American women in New Mexico have the highest rate of homicide among all racial and ethnic groups, and Albuquerque and Gallup are among the top ten cities in the United States for missing and murdered cases. The federal Not Invisible Act Commission recently visited Albuquerque to hear from stakeholders. On the next Let’s Talk New Mexico, we’ll discuss what still needs to be addressed.

Ten years ago then-Governor Susana Martinez froze the Medicaid funding of 15 behavioral health agencies in New Mexico after the state Human Services Department said an audit found “credible allegations of fraud.” While all the accused providers were later cleared by the attorney general, the incident severely disrupted the state’s behavioral health care system. On the next Let's Talk New Mexico we'll ask, "where are we now with our behavioral health care system?"

On the next Let’s Talk New Mexico we’ll talk about residential solar power. We’ll go over government incentives to make solar power more affordable, whether solar installations are now affordable enough to make sense economically, and we’ll discuss the environmental impact solar power and the equipment to produce it can have. We’ll also talk about those folks knocking on doors trying to get homeowners to sign up.