In February, Trent John sat down at his desk in the Children, Youth & Families Department and opened up a password-protected Excel spreadsheet. A list of psychotropic medications prescribed to most of the foster-care children in New Mexico popped up on the screen. There were 31 pages chock full of detail about antipsychotics, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, […]
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Posted inEnvironment, Featured
Death Highway
A massive oil boom in the Permian Basin has turned rural roads into deadly highways
Posted inCriminal Justice, Featured
Locking down revenue
Small towns profit from incarcerating migrants
Posted inFeatured
The price of oil
COUNSELOR — About halfway through a late-April Sunday service at the Living Spring Baptist Church, the sermon took an unusual turn. Pastor Tom Guerito’s exhortations to trust in God and resist sin, delivered mostly in Diné, gave way to a more earthly concern: oil and gas. “People say, ‘I smell it,’” Guerito told the 20 […]
Posted inChild & Family Welfare
Criminalizing Disability
Special-needs kids who don’t get help in school are winding up in jail.
Posted inFeatured
First, aid
SOCORRO – Carlos slides through the windowless halls of Socorro High School with the grace of a jaguar, like he owns these disinfected floors, these metal lockers, this 7-foot sculpture of a Native American “Warrior” mascot in its glass case. Tight fade haircut. Zirconia studs glinting in his lobes. Calls himself a “New Mexico pretty […]
Posted inChild & Family Welfare
Left Behind: Where does the funding go?
New Mexico public schools get most of their budget — around 70 percent — from the state, based on a complex formula that takes into account everything from poverty rates to the number of special needs students. But once districts get that money, they have wide leeway as to how they actually spend it. And […]
Posted inChild & Family Welfare
Left Behind
QUESTA – When the fire alarm sounded before lunch in November of 2017, the staff at Alta Vista Elementary School knew they had a problem. A 6-year-old boy confined to a wheelchair needed to evacuate with the rest of his class. Unfortunately, the school had never purchased a chair that would let him leave the […]
Posted inFull Archive
In hot water: The dangerous side of a renewable energy project
From the outset, local residents had questioned Cyrq’s assertion that it could pump geothermal water from thousands of feet down and reinject it at similar depths without tainting the shallow, freshwater aquifer. Like many places in New Mexico, the health of the local farm and ranch economy is rooted to the water. So are the lives of the scattered people who live in the Animas Basin.
