Educating New Mexicans

During my sophomore year of high school, I had been working after school and on the weekends for more than two years. My wage was $3.50 an hour which, at the time, was great money to me. I was not interested in school anymore and decided I was going to drop out of high school. After I made my decision, I went to the counselor and asked what the process was for me to drop out of school, being that I was only sixteen years of age. The counselor handed me a form to fill out, and surprisingly, no one attempted to talk me out of it.

While I was filling out the information on the form, a principal from another school happened to be in the building. I recognized him as being one of my mother’s friends. He asked me what I was doing; I replied that I was dropping out of school to work full time. The principal literally grabbed me by the collar and drove me to the Santa Fe Vocational Technical School which, at the time, was adjacent to Santa Fe High School. We approached the guidance counselor and he ordered the counselor to enroll me in the school and register me in any classes I was interested in. The classes I chose were a computer class (there were punch-card computers, if anyone even remembers such a thing) and welding.

I decided I would give this a try for a few weeks to appease the principal, and then my plans were still to drop out of school. However, I never dropped out of school. I graduated from high school in 1982. Unfortunately, today there are still too many of our students who don’t get diverted from dropping out of school. New Mexico is ranked 48th in the nation for graduation rates. Only the District of Columbia, Georgia, and Nevada have lower graduation rates. Our children are not getting high school diplomas which eliminates them from contention for careers which offer a living wage, benefits, and a higher education. This leads, in turn, to higher poverty rates, domestic violence, alcoholism, and higher rates of incarceration in our criminal justice system. In the U.S., 70% of students graduate from high school while in New Mexico, 54% of students graduate. In hindsight, this means almost half of our New Mexico children will not graduate high school!

My education was saved by a Vocational Technical School, and I may have inherited a bias towards a better solution than what was available to me those some years ago. However, the truth is that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution. Today’s children are dropping out for many different reasons. And I believe we have lost our vocational technical schools in recent years. The Vo-tech school that was instrumental in finishing my high school education no longer exists. The Santa Fe Public Schools of today are offering some of the courses that were available in the old Santa Fe Vocational Technical School. This is my plan to help increase the graduation rates in our great state of New Mexico.

A group called America’s Promise Alliance proposes Five Promises we should make to our children to promote graduation. I support incorporating these promises into a statewide strategy to combat the drop-out rate.

The Five Promises are those of developmental resources — wrap-around supports— that young people need for success in life:

• Caring Adults
• Safe Places
• A Healthy Start
• An Effective Education
• Opportunities to Help Others

Encourage public funding for school district development of Vocational Technical Schools in all districts; in particular, the urban areas of New Mexico which have the highest dropout rates. The schools would have a focus on attracting students who are at risk and working with our youth to steer them towards graduation. Another mission would be helping youth acquire skills once they graduate; skills that would allow them to work after high school. The focus would include childcare, law enforcement, nursing, military service through ROTC programs, paralegal studies, and teaching. All students would be encouraged to attend college and especially in those areas of focus where a college education is a necessity for employment. Our background mission would include piquing students’ interests in high school which could give them encouragement to reconsider attending college.

We must educate parents and students alike with a statewide campaign to make graduation of our students a priority. We need to be aware of the challenges in order to assist and provide each parent and student with the tools they need to promote higher education. A statewide education campaign is needed in order to educate our citizens in the resources available.

Money is an important resource to anyone’s education, and finding the available funds to incorporate my education plan will be a priority. I believe that we can streamline the state’s spending in areas such as exempt employees and State Auditors’ need to detect and investigate inappropriate and illegal spending. NM State Auditor Hector Balderas said that between 3% and 5% of the over $6 billion dollar state budget is wasted every year by corruption and incompetent administration of public resources. We need to give the State Auditor and Attorney General the tools and funding to investigate and combat this mis-spending. This will save the state monies that could be diverted directly toward the state’s educational goals. Auditing of current state contracts will also save the state money, which could be used for dropout prevention. Finally, I believe re-focusing the existing education spending towards dropout prevention will increase our future tax dollars.

Increasing graduation rates will create more qualified workers, who will then be able to earn more money, and pay more taxes based on those increased incomes. There will also be a savings which will impact prison and medical costs; since an educated young adult is less likely to go to prison, or have children at a young age, they will stand a better chance of paying for their health care costs.

Paying for these programs has always been an issue. Many times in New Mexico, we have seen our executive branch and legislators find monies for “pet projects”. Our childrens’ education—particularly, reducing the high school drop-out rates—should be our top priority and declared, “the official state pet project!”