Politics

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.

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.

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.

Like indigenous peoples around the world, they are today reclaiming their place as data researchers.

In the last 10 years, so much has changed in Sunland Park and elsewhere along the border that observers are girding themselves for what may prove to be a damaging undercount in the 2020 census.

A Searchlight investigation finds billions of taxpayer dollars have flowed out of state since 2013 due to government purchases that are not filled — or cannot be filled — by New Mexico companies.

The data don't exist in an easy-to-grasp form, so we decided to create and share it.