Latest news with #MikeHyatt
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Gallup-McKinley County Schools to Transform K-12 Virtual School
District announces enhanced virtual education program bringing expanded opportunities and support for students GALLUP, N.M., May 30, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Gallup-McKinley County Schools announced today its strategic plans to transform and operate RISE Online Academy New Mexico, the district's K-12 virtual school, beginning with the 2025-26 school year. This represents an evolution of the current academy, bringing enhanced educational experiences and expanded opportunities to students and families throughout the district and state. "We are excited to enhance our K-12 virtual offering and provide our students and families with a quality learning experience," said Mike Hyatt, Superintendent at Gallup-McKinley County Schools. "This transformation will bring new opportunities, improved support systems, and more ways for our students to succeed academically while maintaining the flexibility that virtual education provides." The new and expanded offerings include: Innovative Curriculum Options: New curriculum pathways that align with student interests and goals, supported by supplemental tools and resources to enrich the online learning experience. Flexible Scheduling: The program accommodates diverse student needs with both synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities, allowing students to balance education with other commitments. Engaging Extracurricular Activities: Students can participate in virtual and in-person clubs, interest-based activities, field trips, workshops, and community events to build connections and enhance their educational experience. Increased Teacher Support and Engagement: Instructor availability and support systems provide more personalized attention and academic guidance for each student. Enhanced Technology Access: Enrolled students will receive school-provided laptops and access to enhanced WiFi coverage. The transformed virtual school will continue to serve students throughout New Mexico, with the current academy families receiving detailed information about enrollment continuation. More information about the enhanced program and new opportunities will be available in the coming weeks. Interested families are encouraged to visit to register for fall or email info@ for information on enrollment procedures and enhanced program offerings. View original content: SOURCE Gallup-McKinley County Schools Melden Sie sich an, um Ihr Portfolio aufzurufen.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Complaint alleges Gallup-McKinley Schools superintendent violated state ethics laws
(Image via New Mexico In Depth) Gallup-McKinley County Schools Superintendent Mike Hyatt is under scrutiny for alleged violations of state procurement and government ethics laws, following a complaint filed Monday with the New Mexico State Ethics Commission. Submitted on behalf of Stride, Inc. and its online education subsidiary, K12 Virtual Schools, the complaint alleges Hyatt sought a $235,000-per-year salary as Stride's Vice President for Academic Innovation, while the company had an active contract with the school district—and when he was not hired for the position, Hyatt sought to terminate that contract. K12 provides online education for the district's Destinations Career Academy of New Mexico. This story was originally published by New Mexico In Depth. 'Superintendent Hyatt is apparently knowingly and willfully abusing his public position, at the expense of ~4,200 New Mexico students' who are enrolled in online schooling, the complaint alleged. In an email to New Mexico In Depth, Monday, Hyatt refuted the allegations, saying the company, not he, behaved in 'illegal' and 'unethical' ways, because of inadequate student-teacher ratios for their online courses. 'We have recently found out the illegal [and] unethical practices of Stride and how they are profiting and increasing revenue by breaking the law in our online program,' Hyatt wrote. 'We notified them of their wrongdoing and had previously notified them to not break the law when it comes to students teacher ratios.' The ethics complaint letter alleges that Hyatt potentially violated the New Mexico Government Conduct Act (GCA) and state procurement code. 'The GCA has specific prohibitions against a public officer or employee seeking employment with a contractor who has a contract with the public officer or employee's employer,' according to the complaint. 'The Procurement Code similarly prohibits an employee who is participating directly or indirectly in the procurement process to become, or to be, while such an employee, the employee of any person or business contracting with the governmental body by whom the employee is employed.' The complaint was filed by attorney Laura E. Sanchez of the law firm Rodey, Dickason, Sloan, Akin & Robb, P.A., in Albuquerque. The New Mexico State Ethics Commission declined to comment on the complaint or its investigation plans. On Monday, Deputy Director Amelia Bierle told New Mexico In Depth in an email that the Commission does not comment on alleged ethics violations before investigations are concluded. Gallup-McKinley signed an Educational Products & Services Contract with K12 in June 2020. Hyatt was district superintendent. According to the company's complaint letter, Hyatt applied for the company's VP position on December 11, 2024 and was initially interviewed on Jan. 21, 2025. On Feb. 21, the company's senior vice president of schools, Adam Hawf, spoke with Hyatt by phone to let him know he had not been hired. 'Mr. Hawf called Superintendent Hyatt, as opposed to issuing him a formal letter, due to the sensitivity of the relationship and fear that Superintendent Hyatt would adversely affect the District's relationship with the Contractor,' the complaint letter states. In his email to New Mexico In Depth, Monday, Hyatt confirmed, 'I applied for a job there in 2024.' Less than a month after the call with Hawf, at a routine monthly meeting with the company on March 10, Hyatt's demeanor had become 'completely different than it had been in past meetings,' according to the complaint letter. '[T]he meeting was hostile […] instead of amicable and collaborative.' On April 1, Hyatt sent a breach of contract and termination letter to the company, citing several alleged contract breaches, including inadequate student-teacher ratios, teacher licensure, and problems with student achievement in Destinations Career Academy students. Three days later, Gallup-McKinley issued a request for proposals to find a new contractor. The termination letter violated a 45-day 'cure' period for contractual disputes, the company contends. The complaint further alleges that Hyatt directed the district to issue the new request for proposals for virtual education services while Stride's contract was still in effect, potentially violating its exclusivity provision. Hyatt knew previously about student-teacher ratio concerns, according to the complaint letter. 'Superintendent Hyatt's conduct after he was denied employment … shows that he is potentially abusing his authority, and not acting in the public interest,' the ethics complaint states. 'He was aware of the alleged student-teacher ratios and the licensure issues prior to submitting his application for employment with the Contractor. He also served as a positive reference for the Contractor with the New Mexico PED [Public Education Department] on February 6, 2025 and for Ohio as recently as February 25, 2025, despite knowledge of the concerns he later raised in the letter to the Contractor on April 1, 2025.' The firm submitted 18 supporting documents with the ethics complaint, including emails and correspondence, the termination letter, and the request for proposals. The company has tried to address Hyatt's concerns within the 45-day 'cure period' set out in the contract but has been hindered by Gallup-McKinley since receiving the termination letter, according to the complaint. Examples include the district delaying teacher criminal history fingerprint clearances and refusing to sign off on teachers' license extensions. 'Out of desperation they are attempting to deflect the harm they have done […] and are trying to create a narrative that I by myself am trying to break a contract for personal reasons,' Hyatt wrote in his email to the news organization. 'Nothing could be further from the truth.'
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
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.
