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 […]
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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 inChild & Family Welfare
A Pattern of Failures
The 11-year-old boy’s explanation didn’t make sense. He had shown up Sept. 25, 2017, at San Juan Regional Medical Center in Farmington — purple bruises covering his body, ligature marks on his neck, a patch of hair ripped from his head and black eyes so badly swollen he couldn’t latch his glasses behind his ears. […]
Posted inNew Mexico's Children
Childhood trauma, lifelong harm
On her third day alone in the house, 7-year-old Linda Fritts slept in her safe place in the closet. She arranged the shelves and fashioned a nest for herself atop a chest of drawers. “I would take stuffed animals in there and my books in there,” she says now. She read by flashlight, Nancy Drew or The Boxcar […]
