One of New Mexico’s largest school districts subjects Navajo students to widespread discrimination and a climate of fear, according to a report released last week by the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission.
THE 25 page report draws on testimony from parents and community members at four public hearings in Navajo Nation communities within the school district. He is urging the New Mexico attorney general’s office to release the results of a two-and-a-half-year investigation into the discipline of Native students in the district.
The Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission report cites a survey published in December 2022 by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica that found that Native students were punished more harshly than other students in New Mexico in the four years ending in 2020. The Gallup-McKinley district, which has the largest Native student body of any local school district in the country, was largely responsible for that disparity, an analysis of student disciplinary records across the state showed. Attorney General Raúl Torrez opened an investigation into the district’s disciplinary practices in 2023.
On Wednesday, Torrez’s chief of staff, Lauren Rodriguez, said the office’s long-running investigation was complete and had revealed “troubling disciplinary practices.” She added that the agency’s “comprehensive” investigation calls on the state Department of Public Education to enforce reporting requirements for student disciplinary data and better track that information. Previously, the district’s former longtime superintendent, Mike Hyatt, had minimized the degree of discipline Indigenous students were provided with information and highlighted poor data collection as a problem.
“It’s our children, our students, who are suffering the consequences of entrenched racism,” Wendy Greyeyes, chair of the commission that issued the new report and an associate professor of Native American studies at the University of New Mexico, said in an interview.
The Department of Public Education should have detected disciplinary disparities in the data it collects from districts, Greyeyes said. “There is obviously no clear verification of the data collected,” she said.
The attorney general’s office told New Mexico In Depth that, despite its findings, it is not clear under state law that the office can “take formal legal action against the district for this particular conduct.”
This lack of legal clarity, the spokesperson said, is why Torrez pushed for comprehensive national civil rights legislation since 2023.
Under New Mexico’s Civil Rights Act, individuals can sue public agencies for violations of the state constitution, but the law does not explicitly authorize the attorney general to investigate and prosecute public agencies for systemic inequities, as the federal Department of Justice can. In 2023, New Mexico lawmakers passed a bill that would have given the attorney general broad authority to investigate state or local agencies for civil rights violations. The bill had bipartisan support, but Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham killed it with a pocket veto. (Lujan Grisham has not made an official statement on the veto but said at the time that the bill was well-intentioned but “would create confusion” and that “much of the work outlined in the legislation can be undertaken by the Attorney General whether or not the bill is signed.” “)
At the time, Torrez told New Mexico In Depth that his office has implied authority to pursue such casesbut that having included it in the law would have made it “perfectly clear”.
Torrez’s spokesperson said he remains committed to seeing such legislation passed.
During the four meetings held by At the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission in September and October, parents, students and community members described harsh discipline, language barriers, discriminatory hiring practices, problems with special education plans and inadequate heating systems in classrooms.
Greyeyes described a pervasive fear of retaliation. Some witnesses cried during the hearings, she said — fearing their words would reach the district — and parents spoke on behalf of children too scared to testify themselves. Transcripts of their testimony have not been made public.
The commission’s report recommends a formal agreement between the Navajo Nation and Gallup-McKinley for the district to adopt a disciplinary policy based on restorative justicea strategy that seeks to rebuild relationships, not just punish the student who caused the harm. Such a policy could model itself on existing talking circle programs in the Cuba Independent School District in New Mexico and the STAR School east of Flagstaff, Ariz., on the Navajo Nation, Greyeyes said.
The report also recommends a comprehensive state financial audit of the district’s spending on Native education compared to that of other students, and it calls on the state Department of Education to better manage and track the districts’ student discipline data.
The school district did not respond to voicemails and emails seeking comment on the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission report.
The problems identified in the commission’s report are “rooted in colonization,” Greyeyes said. “It’s rooted in institutional racism. A lot of these things are sometimes accepted even by our own Navajo people, and we need to get this information out there and find a way to address these issues.”
The report’s recommendations “start that conversation,” she said.
