The state knows relatively little about the people served by its nearly three dozen contracted home visiting providers. Nor is there an answer to how many families the program should serve.

Despite strong evidence that home visiting promotes healthy families and children, state officials have diverted millions of dollars from the program in order to fund child care assistance.

Five New Mexico residents are suing the Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD), claiming the state is effectively cheating eligible low-income families out of money to pay for child care.

The number of children being raised by grandparents has exploded across New Mexico, nearly doubling to more than 55,000 — 10 percent of all the state’s children — since 1990. But many of those grandparents have found themselves denied assistance, often even when they meet eligibility requirements.

I discovered a core of human goodness in troubled places, and it struck me as one of the great ironies that such darkness persists amidst such a culture of deep-rooted familial strength.

New Mexico tends to wait to deal with problems until they grow overly expensive and challenging to solve, Charles Sallee of the Legislative Finance Committee told a forum on early childhood issues this week.

Problems with school "systems" -- which include everything from broken furnaces to mildewed carpets and shredded electrical wires -- are rampant across the state, according to a Searchlight New Mexico analysis of data collected by the agency charged with awarding money to help keep the public schools running.

For Wilhelmina Yazzie, joining the groundbreaking lawsuit against New Mexico wasn’t an easy thing to do. It was the only thing to do.

Behind the recent ruling in the New Mexico school funding lawsuit is nearly a decade of evidence that the state's public schools are not only failing children, but that children will be "irreparably harmed" if schools aren’t improved.

EL PASO, Texas – The kindergarteners of IDEA Edgemere walked quietly single-file down the hall, their uniforms embroidered with the school logo, left hands behind their backs, right fingers over their lips. Shh. Emblazoned on the wall above their heads, a sign read: “We do whatever it takes.”