By Robert Nott, The Santa Fe New Mexican
With just a little over a day to go in the 2023 legislative session, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a bill into law expanding learning time for students in the state’s public schools. House Bill 130 will mandate an increase in learning time in public schools to 1,140 hours, plus additional professional development time for teachers, while allowing districts some flexibility in when to add the hours. “With COVID and parents and so many kids struggling, it’s a challenging environment to make sure kids are getting their focus they need [in school],” Lujan Grisham said in an interview at the state Capitol Thursday. At stake is the potential for students who have fallen behind — even before the COVID-19 pandemic — to bridge learning gaps while their teachers learn new skills to do their job to help students succeed.
Under the provisions of HB 130, teachers in elementary schools would have 60 hours of professional development programming while those in middle or high schools would have 30 hours.
The bill lets districts decide how and when to add the extra instructional hours.
New Mexico has long ranked near or at the bottom in national reports on the state of public education in the country. The landmark 2018 Yazzie/Martinez court ruling said New Mexico must do more to provide enough resources for at-risk student populations — impoverished children, second-language learners and special-needs students — to ensure they have an equal chance to succeed academically.
Rep. Andrés Romero, D-Albuquerque, a high school teacher who introduced HB 130, said in an interview Thursday the extra learning time is “not just about opening up seat time but creating enrichment time for students to reinforce lessons they need to learn in class and providing more time within the school day for mental and social health.”
