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VOL 9 | ISSUE 441 | SEPTEMBER 8, 2023
GMCS back in the hot seat HYATT CONTINUES TO DENY DISCIPLINARY DISCRIMINATION By Molly Ann Howell Managing Editor
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n January, the Sun reported on an incident in which the Gallup-McKinley County Schools district was accused of being responsible for the majority of the state’s expulsions of Native American students from schools. Now, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is looking into the situation. In an email to the Sun, the Office of the Attorney General’s Director of Communications Lauren Rodriguez explained why the AG wanted to look into the assertion. “AG Torrez took office with a commitment to safeguarding the civil rights of children in New Mexico, including addressing educational disparities within
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the state,” Rodriguez said. “Our office had a representative attend community events earlier this year about the reported disciplinary discrepancies in [GMCS] and recently hired a civil rights attorney to follow up investigating these and other issues impacting educational opportunities for all of New Mexico’s children.” GMCS Superintendent Mike Hyatt is standing by his previous statement that the assertions are untrue. “Essentially this is a continued false narrative … that somehow our staff – who is a majority Native American in the first place – are discriminating against their own people in the discipline that they enforce,” Hyatt said. BY THE NUMBERS Reports claimed that between
the 2016-2017 school year and the 2019-2020 school year, GMCS recorded at least 211 expulsions. In December, Hyatt said that only 15 students were expelled during that time period. “[The claim] of this mass amount of expulsions is false. We have gone back and looked at every single incident and found that there were less than 20 expulsions in the last seven years, and these were for serious offenses having to do with violence, guns, and sexual assault,” he said. “This method that they’re trying to portray as if we’re just reactionary in our discipline is also false. Staff has been trained on and worked extensively on being proactive in our discipline in the past seven years.” However, the district believes that number is even lower than
what was originally reported after they completed an internal audit of the past suspensions and expulsions. In an interview on Sept. 6, Hyatt said they were still working to complete the audit. He said it would be complete by next week. Hyatt said the incorrect number that he initially told the school board in January needed to be changed after district staff recently took time to thoroughly look through a former student information system that the district no longer uses. When they looked at the data in January, Hyatt said they didn’t have complete access to the former system, calling the initial report “bad data.” Now that they have full access to the former system, Hyatt said they’re doing the internal audit so that they can
give the New Mexico Department of Education accurate numbers. The district now asserts that there have only been two expulsions and one modified expulsion in the past seven years, and they all happened in the 2022-2023 school year. A modified expulsion refers to when a student with a disability gets into severe trouble. GMCS’s recorded expulsions rates: • One Native American student was expelled for a firearm possession • One Native American student was expelled for theft and a firearm possession • One Hispanic student who is in the Special Education
GMCS | SEE PAGE 18
Gallup Sun • Friday September 8, 2023 1