DAILY LOBO new mexico
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thursday November 21, 2013
Senators: Raising Lottery GPA a bad plan by Ardee Napolitano news@dailylobo.com @ArdeeTheJourno
As the debate whether to prioritize students’ merit or need when it comes to the Lottery Scholarship continues, some state lawmakers have officially refuted raising the grade point average requirements for the scholarship. In a forum organized by various organizations in the South Valley on Tuesday, New Mexico Sen. Michael Sanchez, D-Belen, and Sen. Linda Lopez, DBernalillo, expressed concerns with changing the GPA requirement of the Lottery from the current 2.5 to 2.75. Raising the GPA requirement would be an exclusionary move, Sanchez said. “It excludes certain students from being able to go to college,” he said. “There are a lot of people who work long hours, who come from different backgrounds, who may not be able to get a higher grade point average. I don’t think students should be excluded.” Funding for full-time awards for the Lottery is supposed to run out during the beginning of next fiscal year because of lower revenue in lottery sales in the state accompanied by an increasing demand for the scholarship in the state. According to the New Mexico Higher Education Department, lottery sales only amounted to $40 million this year, leaving funding for the Lottery at a $20 million shortfall.
Legislators and University administrators have been discussing the most probable possibility of raising GPA requirements to solve the problem. Last month, UNM President Robert Frank told the Daily Lobo that “if I have to bet, I’d bet on that as one likely solution.” Sanchez, who originally introduced the Lottery Scholarship bill in the Legislature in 1996, said he is working with the Lottery Scholarship Fund Work Group in the Legislature at the moment. He said he will be ready to push for a bill that would not raise GPA requirements when the 2014 legislative session begins in January. “We are going to introduce some bill, and it will be introduced this session,” he said. “It’s not going to be any of the recommendations from the president of UNM or another group.” Lopez, who is running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination for next year’s statewide election, said a higher GPA requirement would hurt UNM’s commitment to education. “Raising the GPA requirements would not help any more of our students graduate,” she said. “What our intent is for education to be open, allowing our students to come in to get a wide breadth of information … As you continue to mess around with regard to the GPA, you’re fiddling around with students’ access to stay in the system to have access to the scholarship.”
Di-Linh Hoange / Daily Lobo Virginia Necochea, a South Valley community member, speaks at the Lottery Scholarship Forum at the South Valley First Choice Health Complex on Tuesday evening. Legislators and University administrators have been discussing the possibility of raising Lottery Scholarship GPA requirement from 2.5 to 2.75. And based on her experience, this move would be a “discriminatory” one, Lopez said. “My background is in (human resources) development — bachelor’s and master’s degrees in HR development,” she said. “The best employees that any company would hire will always have between a 2.0 and a 3.0 GPA … So why are we discriminating? Why do we continue push up that?” In the forum, members of
organizations that hosted the event, most of which are Hispanic, shared stories of how the Lottery had been beneficial to their college careers. Participants’ speeches were translated to Spanish. Jorge Garcia, senior program manager of UNM’s El Centro de la Raza, an organization that promotes Latino student education and one of the event hosts, said prioritizing student merit with regard to the Lottery would disadvantage students of color.
“Although no one could actually argue with merit, excellence and all of that, when we start talking about merit, we’re also talking about a system that is not very good,” he said. “For the most part, our kids from our communities will end up getting excluded.” Garcia said that although maintaining academic excellence in the University is important, the Lottery should
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Teachers protest new evals UNMH sticks to its by Chloe Henson
assistant-news@dailylobo.com @ChloeHenson5 Protesters in black lined up along the sidewalk outside the Bernalillo Public Schools District Office in a rally Wednesday as part of a statewide movement by teachers and other education employees to protest a new teacher evaluation system. The rally aims to get the attention of the New Mexico Department of Public Education and Gov. Susana Martinez, said Betty Patterson, president of National Education Association New Mexico. “We want them both to realize that teachers are not being treated fairly, the evaluation is not going well and that kids are being tested too much,” she said. This school year, the governor decided to implement a new teacher evaluation system that links educators’ evaluations to students’ scores in a standardized testing process, according to The Associated Press. Martinez approved this evaluation process after Democrats in the state Legislature turned down similar proposals earlier this year. Patterson said her organization and the American Federation of Teachers began to plan the event two weeks ago. “Our teachers had just had enough,” she said. “So, we decided we needed to do some kind of event to channel this energy and to let the state know that we are unhappy.”
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About 50 people attended the event. The main problem caused by the new evaluation is the time it takes away from teachers, Patterson said. “Teachers’ lesson plans have gotten longer,” she said. “It’s taking more time to do all of the data for teachers. They don’t have time to work on their teaching. The whole reason for writing the new evaluation plan was so teachers could be accountable and make the changes they need to make to be a better teacher. And now they don’t have the time to make those changes.” Jennifer Trujillo, president of NEA’s Bernalillo chapter, said the evaluation stresses student test scores too much. “We have two evaluations a year where the principals go and observe you in your classroom,” she said. “But our concern is 50 percent of it is assessment. It’s all about student test scores.” Trujillo said the evaluation does not support teachers as it should. “How they should do it is have an evaluation where they support teachers, improve good ones, bad ones, whatever it may be — not punish us,” she said. “And they’re punishing us.” Allan Tapia, superintendent of Bernalillo Public Schools, said he decided to come out and support the protesters because he disagrees with the heavy emphasis on test scores in the new evaluation process.
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guns on vaccines by Stephanie Hoover news@dailylobo.com @StephCHoover
UNMH will not negotiate with a union of employees that filed a complaint regarding mandatory flu vaccines for hospital staff last month, according to a counterstatement filed by the hospital. In the counter-statement to the UNM Labor Management Relations Board on Monday, UNMH argues that “the union wholly fails to demonstrate that the union or its members will suffer irreparable injury by implementation of the policy” because the vaccines are free of charge. The UNMH administration calls on to the board to dismiss the case, according to the statement. On Oct. 29, the District 1199 New Mexico, a local union of health care employees, filed the Prohibitive Practices Complaint against UNMH after it decided
to require employees to receive a flu shot by Dec. 1. UNMH’s counter-statement states that the Centers for Disease Control recommends that all health care workers receive the influenza vaccine to reduce risks to patients. “The hospital’s primary purpose being to protect the safety of its patients, the failure of its employees to become immunized to influenza actually presents a far greater injury than requiring that hospital employees comply with its policy,” the report states. The counter-statement also argues that there are no contract agreements specifically limiting the hospital from implementing vaccine programs as it deems necessary. UNMH writes that the vaccines are a nonnegotiable management right under employees’ contracts.
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