PED imposes new instruction rule

The New Mexico Public Education Department on Thursday imposed a minimum of 180 instructional days for public schools in the 2024-2025 school year despite widespread opposition — including from all four superintendents of Quay County’s schools.

The new rule, which takes effect July 1, means many rural schools will have to set a five-day school week instead of the usual four.

The PED would allow exemptions, but only if they show substantial growth in reading proficiency during the current school year.

Public Education Secretary Arsenio Romero made his case for the rule during an online news conference Thursday.

“It’s not easy,” he said. “But it’s necessary to achieve good outcomes.”

Romero said New Mexico is modeling its efforts after Mississippi at an accelerated pace. Mississippi student achievement has risen from 50th in the country in 2013 to 35th by 2021.

He said four-day schools that have a reading proficiency below 45% can qualify for a waiver if they show a 15% gain from the 2022-2023 school year to the current year.

Districts with a reading proficiency between 45% and 60% will have to show a 10% gain this year to qualify for a waiver.

Districts with 65% to 80% reading proficiency will have to show 8% growth to get the waiver.

Four-day districts with 80% reading proficiency and higher automatically qualify for the waiver, he said.

“We want to be able to keep what you’re doing,” Romero said of those districts.

Early college high schools also are eligible for the exemption, but fewer than 20 schools are that type.

Tucumcari interim superintendent Dave Johnson said his district’s reading proficiency is at 37%, meaning TPS would have to show 15% improvement during the current school year to remain at a four-day schedule.

Johnson said he was skeptical of PED’s plan.

“I don’t think there’s any or much data that shows five-day schools do better than four,” he said. “I look for kind of an uprising out of the four-day people. It’s a way to try to pressure people to get the scores up, but I don’t think it’s the right way.”

According to the NM Vistas website that tracks student achievement at schools, Johnson said even a higher-performing district such as Logan would have a hard time raising reading proficiency enough in one year to qualify for the waiver.

Janelle Taylor Garcia, PED’s deputy director of communications, said in an email the PED still was assessing the best way to determine student proficiency growth.

Dennis Roch, superintendent at Logan Municipal Schools, said in an email he still was analyzing the PED’s plan and its effects.

“Nonetheless, because the state is notoriously slow at releasing student achievement data, we may not know whether Logan qualifies for an exemption from the 180-day requirement until late summer, giving staff, students and families limited opportunity to make informed decisions,” Roch wrote.

Roch added: “It is regrettable that PED chose to persist in dictating how locally elected boards of education must design their community’s school calendars. Anyone who believes in the value of local decision-making is understandably frustrated by this heavy-handed, top-down approach.”

Romero said that teachers who go from a four-day to five-day schedule under the new plan would earn additional pay.

But Coby Norman, superintendent at House Municipal Schools, said such districts still would have to deal with other additional costs, such as bus transportation and utilities.

Norman also said he won’t know what his district’s reading proficiency scores will be until late summer.

He said the rule will penalize small districts such as House because it has a substantial number of learning-disabled students, depressing its proficiency scores.

“I really don’t think there’s going to be 10 school districts that will qualify for a four-day week,” Norman said. “If this rule goes through, then House Schools will more than likely be forced to surrender local control to the state.”

Norman said the PED’s initial 180-day proposal generated over 3,600 responses, “and if you can find 20 that were in favor, good luck.”

Alan Umholtz, superintendent of San Jon Municipal Schools, said he would apply for the waiver, but the qualifications to receive it “are almost impossible.”

“As an educator of 39 years, it saddens me and my heart where only the governor and her friend, the secretary of education, are the only two in the state that supports the 180 plan,” he wrote in an email. “They did not listen to educators, legislators, school supporters, school boards or the school districts that have been doing a 170-day or 4-day calendar successfully.

“It’s sad they are taking more local control away from our school boards because they think they know better than our local school boards/communities do for the success of our students, and I hope someone will file a suit against both of them for the injustice they are doing against the students of New Mexico!”

The lawsuit that Umholtz mentions is a distinct possibility. Roch told his school board in January the New Mexico School Superintendents’ Association was preparing litigation against the 180-day rule.

Roch, a member of the association, said at the time the rule would conflict with state law that specifies 1,140 hours of instruction. He said if a rule conflicts with state law, state law prevails.

Roch cited another state law that allows school boards to choose whether to have four- or five-day weeks.

“If the law already authorizes that choice, then the PED can’t take that choice away,” he said.

Stan Rounds, executive director of the association and the New Mexico Coalition of Educational Leaders, said Friday he and others would meet this week to study the effects of the new rule.

“At this point, we believe the rule does not give sufficient relief to our four-day districts, nor to all districts in New Mexico who use imbedded professional development,” he stated in an email.

Rounds said the groups would talk about “next steps” this week.

Garcia insisted the rule does not contradict state law.

“I hope that schools focus their attention away from lawsuits and toward improving the educational system in New Mexico,” she stated in an email.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham stated she supports a 180-day rule. On Wednesday, she used her line-item veto powers to delete an item from the New Mexico Legislature’s appropriations bill that would have prohibited PED from using state funds to implement the rule.