06-02-2025
A New Mexico school district says it's improved school discipline. The data is unclear.
Bryant FurlowNew Mexico In Depth
Two years after New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica first reported that Indigenous children in New Mexico face disproportionately high rates of harsh school punishment, triggering a state Department of Justice civil rights inquiry, the school district most responsible for that statewide disparity says it has dramatically reduced its number of long-term suspensions. The district has made policy changes to better engage with students and prevent behavior problems instead of just reacting to misbehavior, Gallup McKinley County Schools Superintendent Mike Hyatt said in an email. 'We have been working extensively with our counselors to be more involved in counseling students with social and emotional needs in addition to academic needs,' Hyatt also replaced the district administrator in charge of student discipline, and that individual has since retired, he to Hyatt, the number of students kicked out of Gallup McKinley County Schools for 90 days or longer dropped from 21 children during the school year 2021-22, to six the following year, and just one student last year. Of those 28 long-term removals, 86 percent (24 cases) involved Native students, Hyatt said in a Jan. 17 email to New Mexico In district now appears to be more judicious in imposing long-term removals, reserving them for serious, potentially dangerous infractions. From 2016 to 2020, Gallup McKinley reported long-term removals for disruptive behavior ('disorderly conduct') in its reports to the state, for example. But all of the cases Hyatt listed for 2021-2023 involved more serious infractions: repeated drug possession, drug distribution, assault, armed battery, theft, and weapons possession, including firearms cases, he wrote. New Mexico In Depth cannot independently confirm Hyatt's claim about reducing rates of long-term suspensions because the state refused to provide the newsroom with complete, unredacted discipline data for the years in Civil Rights Inquiry In 2022, the news organizations undertook a detailed analysis of statewide school discipline rates that showed Indigenous students disproportionately experience the harshest forms of punishment: exclusions from school for 90 days or more and referrals to law enforcement. Using discipline reports obtained from the state Public Education Department, the news organizations found that Gallup McKinley, which boasts the largest Native student body in the nation, was the epicenter of a statewide trend toward Indigenous children being pushed out of classrooms at higher rates than other students between 2016 and 2020. New Mexico In Depth has been unable to independently examine discipline rates for more recent years because of extensive redactions in the public education department's subsequent data Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who heads the state's Department of Justice and its new Civil Rights Division, initiated a review of the matter in late 2023. His investigators ran into similar frustrations in attempting to obtain complete, unredacted data from the public education department, according to emails between the agencies that New Mexico In Depth state justice department inquiry also faced delays in its efforts to obtain student discipline data from Gallup McKinley, emails show. Investigators at one point took the school district to task for violating a statutory deadline in responding to their Inspection of Public Records Act request. Other emails evidenced investigators' frustration over repeated efforts from late 2023 through mid-2024 to get meetings with public education department officials who could provide more detailed data and answer investigators' early June 2024, the state justice department Special Counsel Sean Sullivan urgently requested an in-person meeting with public education department officials to discuss student discipline data, citing connectivity issues during a previous virtual meeting months earlier. The new meeting occurred June 20. But by July 1, Sullivan noted investigators still needed more detailed data from public education department, and had to resort to using summary enrollment data from the public education department's website and a preliminary dataset public education department provided the previous August, Sullivan repeatedly sought answers about missing data from public education department's data repeated inquiries from New Mexico In Depth throughout 2024 and this month, state justice department has not answered questions about the inquiry's progress and whether or not Gallup McKinley and public education department provided the detailed data its investigators sought. On January 17, the organization filed another public records request with the state justice department.(NMDOJ spokeswoman Lauren Rodriguez told New Mexico In Depth on Saturday morning the agency's investigation is ongoing.)Gallup Superintendent Reports Policy ReformsGallup McKinley district officials are working with teachers and staff to foster positive relationships with students and deescalate tense interactions, and to help identify students who need behavioral health services, Hyatt said in an January 15 email to New Mexico In Depth. Hyatt pushed back on New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica's reporting about harsh disciplinary practices. He said that after news headlines in 2022, an internal review identified extensive data entry errors in the district's quarterly student discipline reports to the state. Punishments reported to the state as expulsions should instead have been logged as suspensions, he said. (The district also changed its definition of expulsion; at the time of the newsrooms' analyses, the district defined expulsions as removals of 90 days or longer. Expulsion is now defined as permanent removals.)But New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica found that student removals from school for 90 days or longer — regardless of what those removals are called — remained far higher for Gallup McKinley than the rest of the public education department refused to retroactively accept the district's changed student discipline reports for previous years in the state's discipline database, Hyatt meeting with Torrez about state justice department's inquiry in September 2023, Hyatt contracted with a Kentucky-based financial consulting contractor, Unbridled Advisory, to examine a subset of the district's 'cleansed' and revised student discipline data from school years 2015-16 through 2022-23. The report shows Unbridled Advisor did not conduct a specific analysis of the harshest forms of punishment, like the analysis conducted by the news organizations. Instead, the company's analysis included a broader set of disciplinary actions: referrals to the justice system, in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, orders that students be sent to 'alternative educational settings,' and supervised student isolation ('seclusion'). It did not include less severe punishments in the analysis, like in-school suspensions or seclusion, might obscure larger racial disparities in harsher punishments. Even so, their report showed that Native students' discipline rates were modestly higher than other students, but not high enough in their view to be significant. The company used a statistical test commonly used to assess hiring discrimination, known as the '80% rule test.' Asked why the district's contractor used that test instead of a U.S. Department of Education-approved test specifically designed to identify higher rates of student discipline among minority groups, Hyatt said he was uncertain which test would have been more suitable.
