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after seeing the flames he rushed to get his wife and two grandchildren to safety. He later returned to the active fire to check on his home and keep his yard wet by spraying it down. No injuries were reported and city officials and residents alike credited the firefighters’ quick action for preventing the fire from doing additional damage.
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as empty precincts, but it’s for census data only,” Coakley said, noting that if a person were to move into an empty precinct, the law provides accommodations to ensure he is able to vote. State statute requires the commissioners to comply with the Precinct Boundary Adjustment Act to achieve precincts that are as close to uniform in size and scale as possible. The changes to the precincts were prepared by Research and Polling Inc., an Albuquerque-based market and public opinion research firm, hired by the office of the secretary of state. Secretary of State Dianna Duran approved the precinct boundary adjustments earlier this month and sent the new maps and census block descriptions to the county clerk on June 9. County commissioners had to adopt the changes within 30 days of receiving the letter. Coakley said most of the adjustments to precincts were “relatively small
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to housing, to a natural support system. It takes into account the individual’s vocational and educational level. “The assessment also covers health and physical assessment, along with medication. It delves into recreation and leisure, plus any legal challenges the person may face,” Macias said. Once his assessment is completed, Macias refers the client to the appropriate agencies for follow-up. “We also try to minister to the individual’s spiritual needs. We may refer them to a church for spiritual counseling,” he said. The program can also provide them educational opportunities. “We may get them to enroll in a certification program at ENMU-R,” Macias said. Parsons acknowledged the fact that the individual may lack support or has become isolated. “Many times they do not have the
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bilitation Center, and later as a representative at the state Department of Labor/Local Veterans. He served as a board member to the Roswell Girls Club, the Big Brothers Big Sisters, Roswell High School Parent Advisory Committee, Tobosa Developmental Service and
Evacuation orders for the some 400 residents were scheduled to be lifted at 10 p.m., Thursday. The Swallow Fire comes in the wake of April’s White Fire, which charred more than 9,600 acres and destroyed five homes and numerous outbuildings. Officials said they were investigating the cause of Thursday’s fire and are still unaware of what sparked the White Fire.
mattarco@roswell-record.com
changes” and noted that the county gover nment “does not have much say so” in the process of adjusting precinct boundaries, which is usually done by a third party, in this case Research and Polling Inc. Stan Riggs, county manager, says the adjustments were necessary before redistricting, which is also required by state statute. Redistricting entails dividing the total population of the county equally into the five county commissioners’ districts. “These are our precincts that now we'll get ready for redistricting,” he said. “That'll be next.” Redistricting will likely be complete by mid-October, Coakley said, adding that the commissioners will also have to pass a resolution approving polling places. “We have to get all that in place for the 2012 elections, so we’re shooting for middle October,” she said. emiller@roswell-record.com
ability to apply for resources available to them. For example, how can someone who is illiterate complete the paperwork required for income support or Medicaid?” Macias is responsible for monitoring the client’s compliance. He is also required to show up to court proceedings, which continually evaluate the client, to provide reports on the individual’s progress. Allen referred to Counseling Associates as the onestop access point to public benefits. “They will be given tokens to public transport and get access to benefits in the community. The problem is that they are out of money. They don’t have a place to live or food. They are given structure to follow, counseling, access to Section 8 housing. The program gets their basic problems taken care of.” District Attorney Janetta Hicks agreed. “They get the treatment and monitoring they need to be productive members of society.”
j.palmer@roswell-record.com
Community Foundation of Chaves County. He also participated in the curriculum of the Leadership Roswell Program. He is currently a board member of the Washington Chapel Christian Worship Center, the First Tee of Pecos Valley, Blackdom Memorial Inc. and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Breakfast.
GENERAL
Heat and high winds threaten Southwest wildfire lines ALBUQUERQUE (AP) — Firefighters trying to protect homes, a popular national park and tinder dry patches of forest were tested Thursday as temperatures peaked and winds started to whip up the flames of several wildfires bur ning throughout the Southwest. Along the New MexicoColorado border, the winds pushed one fire toward breaks that had been carved into the rugged landscape by bulldozers. Crews had anticipated the fire’s movement and were prepared to hold the line, officials said. “The fire is really active in the northeast cor ner. That’s where the action is, but they’ve got lots and lots of resources there,” said fire infor mation of ficer James Stone, who was watching smoke rise over the mountains near the command post in Raton. The fire had been sending up giant plumes of smoke that could be seen from the community each afternoon as the flames ate through nearly 26,000 acres of rugged terrain along the state line. Thursday was a little different, partly because crews had made progress on the southern flank and the winds were pushing so hard out of the southwest, away from town. Interstate 25 between Raton and Trinidad, Colo., reopened early Thursday after being closed for four days because of the blaze. Some nearby residents were able to return home Wednesday and more evacuations were lifted Thursday, but residents who live closest to the eastern and some northwest of Raton remained out of their homes for another day.
Fire officials confirmed Thursday that eight homes and six other structures have been destroyed. The nearly 700 firefighters battling the fire were dealing with 35 mph gusts Thursday and temperatures near triple digits. The humidity level was in the single digits, and similar weather conditions were expected through the weekend. The wind also raised concerns among firefighters battling Arizona’s largest blaze at 760 square miles, or 487,016 acres, in the eastern part of the state. A pre-evacuation notice for an area in southeast Eagar was issued Thursday afternoon because of high winds and possible spot fires. While there were no flames licking the ridge above the community like the previous week, fire information officer Richard Hadley said authorities wanted residents to be prepared. The fire remained 29 percent contained, and fire managers were most worried that gusts of up to 45 mph could put pressure on the eastern edge of the fire. They’re especially concerned about the fire burning in the Blue Range area south of Alpine — the least secure part of firefighters’ lines and closest to the nearest town still threatened, Luna, N.M., where about 200 people live. A line of cut fuels and intentionally burned areas was completed between Luna and the fire itself at daybreak Thursday, and fire commanders expressed confidence it would hold. More than 4,600 firefighters are assigned to the fire. Winds kicked up at midmorning, and the hills rising to the south of
Springerville and Eagar, which had been smoke-free Wednesday, were putting of f puf fs of smoke. That same thing was expected to happen along the eastern and southeastern front for the next three days. A single campfire was the fire’s “most likely cause,” Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest supervisor Chris Knopp said. He confirmed that investigators had questioned two people but declined to say any more about the investigation. He called them “persons of interest,” not suspects. On Thursday, Knopp said investigators were only able to get into the area in recent days, more than two weeks after the fire began on May 29. The people who have been questioned were encountered on the day the fire broke out. So far, there is no evidence it was a deliberate arson. “If it’s just negligence, it’s one penalty — a $5,000 fine and up to a year in jail,” he said. “If it’s deliberate, you can get a substantial prison sentence and be responsible for full restitution.” The costs of fighting the fire haven’t been calculated, but they generally run into the tens of millions of dollars on similar -sized blazes. It could be a week or more before a decision on charges is made, he said. U.S. Forest law enforcement officers are conducting the investigation. Hundreds of firefighters have been working for days along the New Mexico line to keep the flames out of Luna. Thousands of others are working the rest of the fire, including around three mountain resort towns in Arizona. About 2,400 people
remain evacuated from Alpine and Greer and smaller vacation enclaves after about 300 were allowed to retur n to the town of Nutrioso on Wednesday. On Sunday, all 7,000 people evacuated from the towns of Springerville and Eagar were allowed to go home. The blaze became the largest in state history Wednesday, exceeding a 2002 fire that burned 732 square miles, or 469,000 acres, and destroyed 491 buildings. Though larger in size, the latest fire has destroyed 32 homes and four rental cabins. On the Coronado National Forest in southern Arizona, another blaze had burned or damaged at least 40 homes and 10 other structures over 14 square miles, or 9,500 acres. It also destroyed a chapel, the Arizona Daily Star reported. At peak burning time on Thursday afternoon, the fire is “probably going to look like a bomb went off,” fire information officer Dale Thompson said. The next three days will be tough because of the winds, he said. The blaze is 17 percent contained. Winds and searing temperatures also moved into southeastern New Mexico, where firefighters battling a blaze that surrounded Carlsbad Caverns National Park had it 70 percent contained. No smoke was visible Thursday and firefighters were confident they had corralled the blaze and protected the park’s visitor center and employee housing. The fire began Monday and charred about 30,500 acres of desert scrub and forced the park to close for three days.
CHICAGO (AP) — Among academics who track the behavior of young adults and teens, there’s a touchy debate: Should the word “entitled” be used when talking about today’s younger people? Are they overconfident in themselves? Jean Twenge, author of the book “Generation Me,” is in the middle of the discussion. The San Diego State University psychology professor has made a career out of finding data that she says shows that college students and others their age are more self-centered — narcissistic even — than past generations. Now she’s turned up data showing that they also feel more superior about themselves than their elders did when they were young. “There are some advantages and some disadvantages to self-esteem, so having some degree of confidence is often a good thing,” says Twenge. But as she sees it, there’s a growing disconnect between self-perception and reality. “It’s not just confidence. It’s overconfidence.”
And that, she says, can pose problems, in relationships and the workplace — though others argue that it’s not so easy to generalize. “If you actually look at the data, you can’t just condense it into a sound bite. It’s more nuanced than that,” says John Pryor, director of UCLA’s Cooperative Institutional Research program, which produces an annual national survey of hundreds of thousands of college freshman, on which Twenge and her colleagues based their latest study. That study was recently published online in the British jour nal Self and Identity. Among other things, Twenge and her colleagues found that a growing percentage of incoming college freshmen rated themselves as “above average” in several categories, compared with college freshmen who were surveyed in the 1960s. When it came to social self-confidence, about half of freshmen questioned in 2009 said they were above
average, compared to fewer than a third in 1966. Meanwhile, 60 percent in 2009 rated their intellectual self-confidence as above average, compared with 39 percent in 1966, the first year the survey was given. In the study, the authors also argue that intellectual confidence may have been bolstered by grade inflation, noting that, in 1966, only 19 percent of college students who were surveyed earned an “A” or “Aminus” average in high school, compared with 48 percent in 2009. “So students might be more likely to think they’re superior because they’ve been given better grades,” Twenge says. Statements like that can set of f the generational firestorm. Young people are quick to feel picked on — and rightly so, says Kali Trzesniewski, an associate professor of human development at the University of California, Davis. “People have been saying for generations that the next generation is crumbling the world,” T rzesniewski says. “There are quotes going back to Socrates that say that kids are terrible.” But in her own research, she says she’s been hardpressed to find many differences when comparing one generation to the next — and little evidence that even an increase in confidence has had a negative effect. Many bosses and others in the workplace have long argued that recent college students often arrive with unreasonably high expectations for salary and an unwillingness to take criticism or to pay their dues. “But a lot of them have a
confidence that we wished we had,” says psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, a research professor in the psychology department at Clark University in Massachusetts. He studies “emerging adulthood,” a ter m that has been coined to describe the period from age 18 to 29 when many young adults are finding their footing. Arnett doesn’t object to Twenge’s findings. But he adds: “I disagree with using those findings as a way to promote these negative stereotypes of young people, which I spend a lot of my time battling against.” He says those stereotypes also overshadow positive trends related to young people, in the last decade or so. “If you look at the patter ns in young people’s behavior, all the news is good, pretty much. Crime is down and rates of substance abuse are down, way down. Rates of all kinds of sexual risk-taking — from abortion to sexually transmitted diseases — are down.” You also can’t look at factors such as self-confidence and feelings of superiority without considering other findings that balance out those traits, says Pryor from UCLA. Look, for instance, at community service, he says. In 1990, when the question was first asked in the survey, about 17 percent of college freshmen said there was a very good chance that they’d participate in public service in college. In 2010, nearly a third of freshman said the same. In addition, in 1989, twothirds of college freshman said they had volunteered in high school, compared with nearly 87 percent surveyed last year.
Study: More college freshmen feel overconfident, ‘above average’
12% of NM grads did not earn diplomas ALBUQUERQUE (AP) — More than a tenth of seniors who graduated from New Mexico high schools last year didn’t deserve their diplomas, according to an audit from the Legislative Finance Committee. In a sample of about 3,000 graduates from 10 high schools, 12 percent lacked at least one graduation requirement in 2010, the report said. The audit also showed that 25 percent of Native American males graduated without fulfilling statemandated math requirements. “The point of this is we don’t have
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enough students getting diplomas, and of those, not enough have the credits and are prepared for college and careers,” said Peter Winograd, director of the University of New Mexico Center for Education Policy Research, who helped prepare the report. The audit comes as the state struggles to increase its graduation rate, which was 67.3 percent last year. Winograd said he doesn’t think schools are deliberately undermining the law, according to the Albuquerque Journal.
“I don’t think it’s malfeasance, I think it’s the complexity of the data,” Winograd said. “The amount of time counselors and high school staff spend on transcripts is very high. And in today’s world, we ought to be able to give them some support.” Shirley Crawford, superintendent of Capitan Municipal Schools, was skeptical of the report and said she has faith in her staff and students. “I can’t help but think that someone misunderstood the data,” Crawford said.