A coalition of tribal nations and students is suing the federal government over major cuts to a pair of colleges and a federal agency serving Native American students.

The staffing cuts, part of President Donald Trump’s effort to reduce the federal workforce, have slashed basic services on the campuses of ​​Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, known as SIPI, in New Mexico. The lawsuit says the feds failed to notify or consult with tribal nations prior to making the cuts.

notes that those schools — as well as the federal Bureau of Indian Education — are part of a system that fulfills the federal government’s legal obligation to provide education for Native people. Tribal nations secured that right in a series of treaties in exchange for conceding land.

“The United States government has legal obligations to Tribal Nations that they agreed to in treaties and have been written into federal law,” Jacqueline De León, staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, the legal group leading the lawsuit, said in a announcing the case. “The abrupt and drastic changes that happened since February, without consultation or even pre-notification, are completely illegal.”

Three tribal nations and five Native students have joined the lawsuit. Asked about the case, federal officials told media outlets they do not comment on pending litigation.

According to Haskell student Ella Bowen, cuts to custodial staff have left bathrooms with overflowing trash cans and no toilet paper. SIPI student Kaiya Jade Brown said that school’s campus has suffered from power outages because of a lack of maintenance workers.

Both schools lost roughly a quarter of their staff last month after Trump and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency task force ordered major cuts across a slew of federal agencies. While the schools have since been able to hire back some instructional staff, “[i]t is not even close to enough,” Native American Rights Fund Deputy Director Matthew Campbell said in the statement.

Thirty-four courses at Haskell lost their instructors in February, according to the statement.

Some students have reported delays in their financial aid, and SIPI students are dealing with brown, unsafe tap water, with repairs put on hold due to the cuts, the statement said. And the school did not have enough faculty to administer midterm exams.

The Pueblo of Isleta; the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation; and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes are suing the feds.

“Despite having a treaty obligation to provide educational opportunities to Tribal students, the federal government has long failed to offer adequate services,” Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes Lieutenant Governor Hershel Gorham said in the statement. “Just when the Bureau of Indian Education was taking steps to fix the situation, these cuts undermined all those efforts. These institutions are precious to our communities, we won’t sit by and watch them fail.”

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It worked. Reimbursements rose from $1.7 million in state funds to 41 providers in 2017 to to 328 providers in state and Medicaid funds through the Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention benefit in 2023.

Most of those new centers engaged in applied behavior analysis. ABA is an intensive behavior modification technique that aims to make autistic children act more like their typically developing peers by “extinguishing” certain traits through compliance with specific repeated commands. (A 74 investigation last year demonstrated that there is no reliable data to show the treatment works, and that it may actually cause harm to patients.)

Last year, the FBI began investigating whether some of those treatment centers have defrauded Medicaid, billing for services never provided. Though investigators have not said how many for-profit centers they are looking into or who their clients are, many are believed to enroll the children of East African immigrants, who are particularly vulnerable because of the lack of culturally appropriate services. There are also indications the alleged fraudsters may have ties to defendants in the country’s largest , in which nonexistent food distribution sites supposedly created to provide children with meals during COVID-related school closures billed the state for hundreds of millions of dollars.

As the 2025 legislative session gets underway, state lawmakers are holding hearings on proposals to tighten oversight. Most of the testimony has centered on to require services to be provided by licensed professionals in safe settings. But some autism advocates have expressed concern that those standards will entrench ABA as the dominant approach — one that, among other things, is replacing other special education services in schools — instead of supporting alternatives that they say are more effective and humane.     

One of those who testified is Native American Jules Edwards, the autistic parent of three autistic youth, ages 11, 19 and 21, and a member of the Anishinaabe Eagle Clan. After , she told a state Senate committee that ABA is not a therapy, but “a specific methodology that was created by the same people that created gay conversion therapy.”  

Right now, providers are not required to be licensed; are allowed to describe employees who may have only a high school diploma as therapists; and are not held to the same safety standards as even home day care centers, Edwards testified. “Despite the ABA industry lobbying for more power over the autism community, they need their power restricted until they can prove with empirical and independent evidence that they are doing what they claim they are doing” in terms of providing effective, safe services.  

Edwards recently expanded on her testimony in an interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What motivated you to testify?

When my children were diagnosed with autism, I threw myself into research. I learned about autism and I learned about interventions. I learned from professionals, parents and autistic adults that autism is a social, communication and sensory disability, and not a behavioral disorder. I learned that applied behavior analysis is a behavior modification program that requires autistic children to suppress their natural way of being in order to please the adults around them. 

That didn’t make sense to me. Why wouldn’t we want to address any underlying needs first? Typically, autistic kids specifically need to learn the why, because we’re bottom-up learners. We like to gather information about things before taking action. But ABA requires a top-down, authoritative approach, where autistic children are not allowed to ask why. They are required to comply with authority, and that poses a lifelong danger to that child. 

Testifying was an opportunity to highlight the fraud, waste and abuse that happens within the ABA industry. American taxpayers pay billions of dollars per year to enrich private equity investors under the guise of an autism therapy that works. However, ABA isn’t a therapy, and it hasn’t been proven to improve quality of life. 

The Department of Defense’s 2020 reported that 76% of children in ABA showed no improvement after one year, 16% had improved, but 9% were worse after a year of treatment. That really brings into question the cost-effectiveness of ABA. When we’re talking about fraud and waste of Medicaid dollars or taxpayer dollars generally, we need to be honest about the actual outcomes. 

But there’s little oversight. The state doesn’t require health and safety procedures, behavior guidance, standards, first aid, CPR. They aren’t required to have a mental health response, crisis response or suicide intervention plan. They don’t have to provide culturally responsive treatment practices. 

A 5-year-old child was just in a hyperbaric chamber in an unaccredited ABA center in Troy, Michigan. The chamber exploded with the child inside, and he passed away.  We know that hyperbaric chambers aren’t actually a treatment or cure for autism or anything like that. It’s not approved by the FDA. If there was oversight, if there was licensing, if there were safety requirements that prevented this kind of alternative treatment it could have saved that boy’s life. 

The state’s suggests “modern” ABA has largely stopped using punishments to discourage certain behaviors. But I have heard parents and autistic adults who have experienced ABA say it is still coercive. Can you give us an example?

Planned ignoring, which is a technique used in ABA, basically denies the humanity of the child who is subjected to it. When we’re children, whether you’re autistic or not, and you’re hanging out with another kid, and the other kid is pretending you don’t even exist, it’s dehumanizing. But now, within ABA, the adults do that to the children.

Say a child is throwing a toy that they shouldn’t be throwing. They may not be hurting anybody. They might be throwing it because they like the sound. It could be stimming [the term for a repetitive sound or motion an autistic person may use for emotional regulation or to express ]. It could be anything. The adult doesn’t want the child to play with the toy that way. 

They might try other interventions before planned ignoring, but then the child is being ignored completely, whether the child is trying to gain the attention of the behavior tech or not. This can cause increased “behaviors” of the child escalating, trying to gain that attention. But no matter how much the child tries, the adult is not going to give in.

We can see how frustrating that must be, particularly if that’s a child who may be struggling with communication and may not say, ‘Hey, I really want to play ball right now.’ That kid is maybe unable to ask for what they want, or the way that they’re asking is a behavior that the behavior tech doesn’t like.

Is there a danger that as the state creates standards and licensing procedures to protect children, it will further codify this industry as the dominant treatment? 

Absolutely. ABA is currently the dominant treatment. They have lobbyists. They absolutely can persuade legislators to further empower the industry. Because they have the most money, they have the most power right now. 

A lot of the research about ABA, claiming it’s the gold standard treatment, etc., is funded by and conducted by the people who profit from it. We need to be sure that decision makers are looking at facts and data and information that isn’t that doesn’t involve a conflict of interest. It’s really important that we refer to outside, independent researchers, like the Department of Defense study.

There was a push at one point for board-certified behavior therapists [credentialed ABA supervisors] in Minnesota to be able to diagnose autism. They would then be able to enroll those children in their services. That is dangerous, because children who need a diagnosis need to go to an actual medical professional and have other conditions ruled out. They need to be evaluated for potential co-occurring conditions, etc. If a behavior therapist is able to diagnose autism, but they can’t diagnose anything else, then all of that child’s underlying conditions or additional conditions may be overlooked. 

If my children didn’t have full-team neuropsych evaluations, I wouldn’t know about their learning disabilities, and I wouldn’t know how to provide support. I wouldn’t know how to advocate for my children in school. My child used to be punished for his writing disability until we learned, through that neuropsych evaluation, there’s a dysgraphia issue. So let’s provide writing prompts. Let’s provide support for writing. Let’s provide adaptations and assistive technology. If he only had an autism diagnosis, that would have been met with behaviorism, he would have been rewarded for doing well, punished for struggling, and he wouldn’t have had access to the tools that he needs. 

There are definitely other treatments that don’t have that same level of influence but may be more effective, may be more humanizing. A lot of those are not as widely available. 

Many kids spend half or or all of their day in an ABA center rather than in a school where their learning would be attended to.

It’s a problem that begins in preschool. Children are often pushed out of public schools when a school or preschool doesn’t have the knowledge or resources to care for the child. They say, “Maybe this isn’t the best fit for you.” That’s something that my family has heard from our local public school. That’s not really a thing that a special education director should be saying to any family, and we should be concerned about the people who are most marginalized in our communities. When those kids are excluded from public schools, parents are often left with very few options. 

ABA centers market themselves as being able to help children to gain skills and become more independent. But if that were so, why isn’t inclusion in public schools the ultimate goal of ABA centers? ABA centers are not schools. They’re not accredited to provide education. There are very few ABA centers that have transition paths or goals for kids to move out of ABA and into mainstream schools. Instead, many children remain in ABA, sometimes throughout high school, deprived of the opportunity to learn what their peers are learning. It’s a form of educational neglect. 

Children in ABA often aren’t allowed to learn the most basic things. For example, [behavior therapists] often dissuade spelling to communicate, which means that they’re not encouraging autistic kids in ABA to even learn the alphabet. They aren’t taught literacy, they aren’t taught math, they aren’t taught history. That’s sad and scary, because then when these children grow up, all they’ve learned how to do is comply with authority.

There was a hearing a couple of days after yours where a number of East African parents testified about the conditions that compelled them to take advantage of ABA. There’s an element of desperation, in terms of a lack of alternatives, that must be clouding the picture.

It’s a sad reality that there’s a history here in Minnesota of people preying on immigrant communities. For example, in 2017 there were 75 cases of measles identified in the Somali population in Hennepin County alone, a result of anti-vaxxers who saw an opportunity to push their narrative that vaccines cause autism. They targeted immigrant communities with fearmongering tactics. 

The ABA industry pushes itself onto parents by claiming to be the only hope for their children. I’m very concerned that marketing targets immigrant communities without sharing balanced information that will help parents make informed decisions for their families. I’m worried about the conditions in which ABA is the only option. 

A lot of the time, parents are in a desperate situation where it’s like, “I have to go to work to pay the bills, and I have to have a place for my child to be that is safe and supervised.” And instead of lobbying for inclusion, for appropriate support and services in schools, we’re saying, “Well, this kid can go to ABA instead.” 

That’s not good for anyone, because inclusion benefits all of us. Inclusion benefits abled and typically developing people just as much as it benefits disabled people. I think we can see that right now in our current political climate, where it’s been so normalized to “other” people. That causes harm to all of us. 

ABA is problematic in your culture.

I’m Anishinabe. ABA could never meet my needs as a Native person. “Culturally responsive” essentially means to adapt services to meet the needs and values of a person’s culture. Some cultures, particularly settler-colonial culture, values assimilation. Settler-colonial culture prefers when people blend in and are agreeable to authority. ABA is rooted in that.

Behaviorism seeks to control a person’s behavior with the carrots-and-sticks analogy. We reward the things we want to see, we punish the things that we don’t want to see. We all do get rewarded for doing certain actions, and we all could potentially be punished by other actions.

But it’s not the same micro-management of behavior — you can only communicate the way I want you to communicate. You can only experience your senses the way I want you to experience your senses. You can only socialize the way that I have determined is a valid way of being. 

There’s the stereotype that autistic people don’t make eye contact, but that eye contact is a cultural phenomenon. Not every culture thinks eye contact is this great thing. Some cultures find it disrespectful, but ABA doesn’t always take that into account. It’s determined by the [therapists], not necessarily the child and their family and their culture. 

We should all have some self-determination with how we use our bodies. If I’m not hurting anyone else, I should be able to stim. If I communicate best by writing, that should be encouraged, and I should be provided support and tools to do that. Rather than what happens often in ABA, where parents are told, “This will help your child speak,” but it’s not speech therapy. 

One of my children didn’t speak until he was a little bit older. Starting when he was about 2, he would use one or two words here and there, but he wouldn’t combine them. It was tough, because at the time, we didn’t have a diagnosis, we didn’t have any sort of speech language therapy. As a parent, I relied on very basic sign language. And I was thrilled because I could communicate with my kid whether he was using mouth words or not. Do I wish that we had speech language pathology at the time? Yes, absolutely, that would have been great. But we didn’t. I think that if we had pushed that particular child into using mouth words, I think it would have built resentment.

Now he can speak, but his preferred language now is music, which is really cool because he’s a musician. Music is a really strong cultural practice that’s traditional for Anishinaabe people or Ojibwe people. It’s healing for us, something that we love. Why don’t we encourage that, rather than the ABA ideal of mouth words?

Growing up in Albuquerque, high school junior Brook Chavez, who is DinĂ©, never had a Native American teacher until last year, when she took a Navajo language and culture class. 

There, the 16 year old learned more about her culture and connected with other DinĂ© youth, coming away prouder about who she is. She felt understood by her teacher, David Scott, also DinĂ©, in ways she hasn’t always in the classroom. 

“I learned a lot about my clans, my stories,” Chavez said, adding that at the end of the first semester, she and her classmates performed at Native American Winter Stories, an Albuquerque Public Schools (APS) event. “That’s one of my fondest memories because I got to dress up traditional with all my friends.”

Chavez just wishes she hadn’t had to wait so long. 

There’s consensus among advocates and education officials that it’s important for teacher workforces to be representative of student populations, which research shows is linked to better student outcomes. Same-race teachers can act as important advocates and role models.

But Chavez’s experience is one that many Native American children attending school in Albuquerque are unlikely to have in the classroom, at least in the near future. 

While parents of nearly 10% of APS students report they have tribal affiliations, only 1.2% of teachers the district employed during the last school year were Native American, according to district data. 

The state Public Education Department identified increasing racial diversity among teachers as a priority in its  released in May in response to Yazzie/Martinez v. State of New Mexico, a 2018 court ruling that found the state has failed to provide an adequate education to Native children, among other student groups. 

And district officials in Albuquerque say they’re working to hire more Native American teachers. As part of that effort, they’ve started a state-funded pilot program this school year. 

But challenges stand in the way, including increasing living costs in the city and a less-than-robust educator pipeline.

“Many of our children will never see a Native American teacher in their entire school career and that’s simply because the pipeline is not there to support Native Americans as they come out of high school,” said Rep. Derrick Lente, D-Sandia Pueblo, who for the past several years has sponsored legislation aimed at improving education for Native children. 

Diversity gaps 

There is a sizable Native American population in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city and home to one of the largest school districts in the nation, with 73,346 students as of the last school year. 

A significant number of those students are Native American.

When parents enroll their children in Albuquerque Public Schools, they report their children’s race and ethnicity to the district. During the last school year, 5.2% of students were recorded as being Native American, but 9.8% of students were reported by their parents as having tribal affiliations. 

The latter figure is more representative of the actual number of students identifying as Native American, said Philip Farson, senior director of the district’s Indian Education Department.  Many students are multiracial, Farson said, and end up being recorded as a race other than Native American despite their tribal affiliations. 

A student census shows students from over 100 tribal nations and communities, the Navajo Nation accounting for the majority, with about 57% of Native students. There are significant populations from Laguna and Zuni Pueblos and a large number of students from tribes outside of the U.S., mostly in Mexico and Canada, according to the district. 

In total, 7,192 students reported tribal affiliations. Meanwhile, the district employed 65 Native American teachers during the last school year. That means that for every Native teacher, there were about 110 Native children. 

That gap has only slightly narrowed over the past decade. In the 2011-2012 school year, for every Native teacher, there were 117 Native children. 

Having enough teachers that share the same race or ethnicity of students isn’t just a struggle involving Native students. 

There are also significantly fewer Hispanic teachers than students – with 28% of teachers identifying as Hispanic compared to a student population that is two-thirds Hispanic. 

“I think this is an unfortunate theme across the nation, really,” Lente said. “It’s not just in the Albuquerque public school system, it’s not just in New Mexico, but it’s across the nation.”

Indeed, gaps in racial diversity between teachers and students, as Lente pointed out, are both state and national trends. 

During the last school year, 10% of students in New Mexico public schools were Native American while 3% of teachers were Native, according to the state education department. White students made up 23% of the overall population, while 59% of teachers were white. 

Nationally, about 79% of public school teachers identified as non-Hispanic white during the 2017-2018 school year, while only 47% of students were white, according to a  last year. 

The importance of representation

Education officials, advocates and students alike agree that closing those diversity gaps is crucial in improving students’ overall experiences and boosting their academic achievements. There’s a substantial body of research that backs that up. 

For instance, Black students are 13% more likely to graduate high school and 19% more likely to enroll in college if they had at least one Black teacher by third grade, according to a 2018 National Bureau of Economic Research . 

Researchers say there are likely a combination of factors that explain why teachers’ race, as well as their gender, matters, the New York Times , including that same-race teachers may introduce new material in a way that’s more culturally relevant. 

Teachers who understand where their students come from can act as advocates, said Dr. Glenabah Martinez (Taos Pueblo/DinĂ©), a professor in the University of New Mexico’s (UNM) Department of Language, Literacy and Sociocultural Studies.

As an example, Martinez cited Native American students possibly needing to be absent for a number of days to participate in ceremonies in their tribal communities. 

“If a teacher is from that same community, that teacher completely understands why that student needs to participate and how that student isn’t just missing the white man’s school, the Western school, but they are getting a different type of education that is intensive in terms of the cultural knowledge,” Martinez said. “A Native teacher understands that and they can therefore advocate for that student.” 

She also said it’s important for school districts to have Native American administrators who can guide the creation of culturally relevant curriculum and policies. 

For Chavez, who’s in her junior year at La Cueva High School, having a Native teacher meant that she felt a level of support and acceptance she rarely felt in earlier grades.

She remembers other kids calling her “Indian” and “Pocahontas” in elementary school, and the climate at her high school — where 4.7% of students have tribal affiliations, according to district data for the last school year — isn’t much better, she said. Teachers sometimes single her out, turning to her during lessons that feature Native American cultures or historical figures — regardless of whether they have anything to do with the Navajo Nation — and asking her to weigh in.

“They’ll say, ‘Oh, you’re Native, you should tell us more about it,’” said Chavez, who’s a member of the Native American Student Union at her school. 

Scott’s class was a reprieve. Two days a week, Chavez and a handful of other students from around the city rode buses to the classroom. She became close with some of her peers, who she stays in touch with despite no longer sharing a class.

“My students said they felt better coming in,” Scott said. “They felt like they belonged, as opposed to when they were at their school they were kind of ridiculed and ashamed to say who they were
I told them, you just have to stand your ground but be proud of who you are.”

Scott shared with his students that as a boy, he stayed with his aunt in Texas for the summer and other kids asked him how long it took him to set up his tipi. In college, his peers assumed he was getting a monthly check from the casino, he said.

“I just told them [his students], prepare yourself, educate them,” he said. 

Chavez wouldn’t have had Scott as a teacher had she not made the effort to take a Navajo language course, which involved traveling to another campus twice a week. 

Scott is one of six Navajo language teachers that APS employs. 

To meet the language programming needs of the roughly 4,000 students affiliated with the Navajo Nation, Farson said the district would need to hire up to 100 Navajo language teachers over the next few years.

As of late August, about 200 DinĂ© students are enrolled in language classes, according to district spokeswoman Monica Armenta, and 40 Zuni students are enrolled in language classes taught by the two Zuni language teachers the district employs. 

Chavez desperately wants to keep learning the Navajo language, but there’s not a higher level class she can take this year. She worries she’ll never be fluent. 

Part of why she opted to take Scott’s class was because it meant “keeping the culture alive.” Her grandma, who was sent to  as a child, is the last fluent Navajo speaker in her family, and her sister and cousins aren’t interested in learning, Chavez said. 

The federal government, beginning in the early 1800s, removed Native children from their families and sent them to schools designed to strip them of their cultures. Abuse ran rampant and hundreds of children died, according to  the U.S. Department of the Interior released in May, although the department expects that number could rise to the tens of thousands with continued investigation.

“My grandma didn’t want to teach her kids Navajo because of what happened to her,” Chavez said. “She talks about it now but she still says she’s a little scared. She’s really traumatized by the boarding school.” 

Not enough

Albuquerque district officials said they recognize hiring more Native teachers is important but they’re drawing from a limited supply.

“The district could declare that 5% of our positions have to be filled by Native American educators but they’d run into the reality that there aren’t enough Native American educators to go around,” Farson, APS’s Indian Education Department director, said. 

The department also struggles with retention because the pay, at least for leadership positions, isn’t competitive, Farson said. 

“When we find qualified talent, how do we keep it? That’s our challenge.”

Some Native teachers the district does employ echo Farson, pointing to a lack of affordable housing in the city.

“I was looking but rent is so high and teachers’ pay is not enough to cover it, to even survive on,” said Scott, who began teaching the Navajo language in Albuquerque last year. He commuted the entire school year from Naschitti, which is north of Gallup. It’s more than a five-hour round trip. “A couple times, probably three times, I just slept in my vehicle.”

Mildred Chiquito, who teaches Navajo at Atrisco Heritage Academy High School, lives in Torreon, about 85 miles northwest of the school, with her elderly parents and her 17-year-old daughter.

She wishes there was teacher housing in Albuquerque.

“It’s hard paying for electricity, water and stuff in the city,” Chiquito said. “Some teachers are single parents and they’re just trying to make ends meet
I told my parents if I had teacher housing in Albuquerque, I would take them there and they would stay with me three days out of the week or something and then we go home, back on the reservation.”

The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies’  for 2022 indicates double-digit increases in Albuquerque area rents. 

Some school districts across the country, including in  and , have recently asked parents to temporarily house teachers. One district south of San Francisco recently  a 122-unit apartment complex for teachers and staff on district property.

Chiquito said that while she would like to live in the city on weekdays, the drive is worth it. 

“I love what I do and I love just giving back to the school and I don’t mind the sacrifices of driving,” she said. 

She began over a decade ago when she received a certification that allows people who are experts in the language and culture of a specific tribe or pueblo but don’t necessarily have a college degree to teach in K-12 schools. In March, the Legislature  establishing equal pay for Native language teachers such as Chiquito.

When it comes to recruiting Native teachers, there’s also somewhat of an urban and rural divide.

Martinez, the UNM professor, is heading up  that aims to help Native people become teachers and work in their home communities. 

“We can’t forget that we need teachers who are committed to their own Native communities, to a Native community because they care about the community and it’s located in an area that’s maybe not close to the malls and the 24-hour coffee shops,” Martinez said. “I think we need teachers all over the place, rural and urban, but we’re doing a more concerted effort to recruit Native teachers to be teachers in their own communities so they don’t have to move to Albuquerque.” 

Pipeline focused on Native students doesn’t exist, yet

Earlier this year, APS received a $200,000 grant from the state education department’s  to place a teacher with experience working with Native students along with a coordinator for three years at Mission Avenue STEM Magnet School, where about 20% of students are Native. 

“It’s trying to take an in-depth look at, not only how are students connected and represented within the curriculum of the school, but the staffing of the school,” Farson said, adding that by the end of the program, the school is expected to have a staff that’s representative of the student body. “My hope is that in that process we’ll really be able to surface the real issues and challenges and a plan for how to address them across the district and not just at one school.”

The district recently hired a teacher who’s set to start later this month. The coordinator position is still vacant. 

In his experience with similar grant-funded programs, Farson said the first year “is always a bit rough” but the district eventually fills the positions. 

Rather than trying to recruit teachers from around the state, Farson said the long-term solution is to build locally. 

“Over time, our real solution is to figure out how to develop the interests of those 7,000 students who have tribal affiliations here in APS to want to become educators and stay here,” Farson said. 

State and district education officials cite a number of programs centered around pipeline development, but none of them target Native people in particular, and most don’t target high schoolers. 

There’s the district’s teacher residency program, which pairs people pursuing a degree in education with an experienced co-teacher at a high-need school for 15 months. Residents agree to teach within the district for an additional three years after completing the state-funded program, which the district runs in partnership with UNM and the Albuquerque Teachers Federation. 

There’s also a residency program with Central New Mexico Community College specifically for special education. 

The majority of residents across both programs — about 120 people — are still teaching in the district, according to Valerie Hoose, executive director of labor relations and staffing for the district. 

The district also participates in the state education department’s two-year Educator Fellows program, geared toward educational assistants who want to become certified educators. Fellows receive hands-on experience, mentorship, and a stipend. 

“We’re hoping to stop that bottleneck that happens in the teacher pipeline where we have a lot of people that graduate out of programs and don’t sustain in the field,” said Layla Dehaiman, director of the department’s educator quality and ethics division.

While people have to be over 18 to take part in the program, Dehaiman said department staff have been reaching out to high school seniors and have recruited several recent graduates.

Dehaiman said the department has also been holding a Native American teacher working group over the past year that’s focused on barriers to licensure and long-term recruitment strategies.

Hoose said that getting young people interested in becoming educators is challenging partly because there’s a lot of competition for workers, adding that a widely available internship program for high schoolers might be a useful tool.

“We have a lot of CTE [career technical education] around the state and I think if education was one of those, where students could have access to information and experiences around teaching, that would be helpful,” Hoose said. 

One future teacher might be Chavez. 

With high school graduation in sight, Chavez has been giving some thought to potential careers. While she’s concerned she wouldn’t make enough money in education, she said teaching’s always been an aspiration of hers. 

“I want to be a supportive teacher that I didn’t have growing up,” Chavez said. “A lot of these Native kids are going unnoticed.”