Santa Fe Concert Association changes name, updates image Local News, A-6
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Saturday, April 26, 2014
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Connecticut teen killed at school
Video shows cyclist was westbound
GOP’s big names court gun lovers
Police are investigating whether the suspect stabbed the victim because she refused his prom invite. PAgE A-5
Police say woman fatally struck by train was traveling in a different direction than originally thought. LOCAL NEwS, A-6
Possible presidential hopefuls talk up their pro-gun credentials at the NRA’s annual convention. PAgE A-5
Feds plan to grade teacher training
Gov. stands by Gardner after use of state card Spokesman: Chief of staff had ‘no ill intent,’ repaid more than $5K
By Motoko Rich
The New York Times
The Obama administration announced Friday that it was developing ratings of teacher preparation programs to make them more accountable for their graduates’ classroom performance. Teacher training programs have frequently come under attack as illconceived or mediocre, and teachers themselves have often complained that such programs do not adequately prepare them to handle children with varying needs and abilities. “We have about 1,400 schools of education and hundreds and hundreds of alternative certification paths, and nobody in this country can tell anybody which one is more effective than the other,” Arne Duncan, the education secretary, said at a town-hall meeting at Dunbar High School in Washington on Friday. “Often the vast majority of schools,” he said, “when I talk to teachers, and have very candid conversations, they feel they weren’t well prepared.” By this summer, the administration will propose rules for evaluating all teacher training programs, using metrics that could include the number of graduates placed in schools, as well as pass rates on licensing exams, teacher retention rates and job performance ratings of teachers. A 2013 review of 2,420 teacher preparation programs by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit group that advocates tougher standards for teachers, found that less than a quarter provided concrete strategies for managing students in a classroom. Most of them failed to guarantee that teacher candidates would be placed with highly skilled teachers during student-teaching stints. Any proposals by the administration are likely to stir debate, particularly a requirement that training programs release the evaluation data of their graduates’ performance in the classroom. Currently, 43 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have agreed with the Department of Education to develop teacher performance ratings that include student test scores. Some education experts say that such ratings are not reliable and that it would be difficult to grade teacher training programs using standardized test scores. “This is about a policy that seeks to rate institutions on something that we just cannot feasibly link them to in terms of responsibility,” said Bruce D. Baker, a professor of education at Rutgers University.
Please see TEACHER, Page A-5
Today Partly sunny; storms possible. High 71, low 33. PAgE A-12
Obituaries Alfonso “Brother” Baca, 82, April 15 Albert “Al” Carinci, 83, Albuquerque, March 21 Jerilyn Sue Mosso, 60, April 23 Janice L. Weatherford, 63, April 23 PAgE A-10
Index
Calendar A-2
Classifieds B-6
By Steve Terrell
The New Mexican
Ralph Ford-Schmid, an environmental scientist with the New Mexico Environment Department, checks a water and sediment sampler near the then-planned Buckman Direct Diversion project in 2007. Santa Fe City Councilor Joseph Maestas says people in Santa Fe remain highly concerned about the potential for contamination to wash down from Los Alamos into the Rio Grande and then into the Buckman Direct Diversion project that supplies a majority of the city’s drinking water. NEW MEXICAN FILE PHOTO
LANL pressed to meet legacy waste deadline Lab has until June 30 for work above ground; significant underground cleanup still needed By Staci Matlock
The New Mexican
Underground radioactive waste and groundwater contamination at Los Alamos National Laboratory — the legacy of decades of nuclear weapons research at the lab — will not be cleaned up by a 2015 deadline, the head of the state Environment Department said Friday. New Mexico Environment Department Secretary Ryan Flynn said the lab must meet a June 30 deadline, as part of an agreement between the state and the federal
government, to remove the last shipments of low-level radioactive waste stored above ground on LANL property. But that still leaves huge and expensive swaths of work to be done, including cleanup of a plume of chromium-contaminated groundwater headed toward San Ildefonso Pueblo and the Rio Grande, Flynn told a gathering of elected officials during a meeting Friday of the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities. The state and the U.S. Department of Energy signed a consent decree in 2005
to remove all the legacy waste by 2015. That deadline will have to be rethought, Flynn said, as the work has been complicated by federal funding shortfalls, and more contamination has been found. “That scope of work cannot change and will not change,” Flynn told the coalition of city councilors and county commissioners from the region. “The contamination caused by legacy operations at the lab needs to be cleaned up — period.” Legacy waste was generated by LANL from its nuclear weapons research programs between the mid-1940s and the 1990s. After 1970, most of it was stored at Technical Area 54, Area G, both above and
Please see LANL, Page A-4
Diggers set to unearth ‘E.T.’ games Hundreds expected at N.M. landfill to search for old Atari cartridges
The office of Gov. Susana Martinez defended her chief of staff Friday after news that he used a state credit card for thousands of dollars in personal spending, saying that although it was “poor practice,” there was clearly “no ill intent involved” because he later reimbursed the payments. Keith Gardner In a direct violation of state policy and procedures, which prohibit the use of state-issued cards for personal purchases, the chief of staff, Keith Gardner, used his card for more than $5,000 in payments for hotels, tires, a cellphone and accessories, a necktie, heartburn medication, car fresheners, a coin display case, a copy of Popular Science magazine and more. Some of his purchases were tax-free because they were charged on his government card. Asked about the purchases, which were first reported by The Albuquerque Journal, a spokesman for the governor, Michael Lonergan, said in an emailed statement, “Keith and the chief financial officer met regularly and reconciled purchases. He made regular reimbursements of any items that needed to be repaid. Those purchases and reimbursements were paid back throughout the last three years. This included some personal items and also items related to a different agency but for government business.” In the future, Lonergan said, “in addition to being more careful about ensuring that there are no personal purchases on the card, there will now also be a new pre-authorization requirement for purchases as well. Keith also was required to pay interest at the level of 18 percent on all purchases reimbursed at any time
Please see CARD, Page A-4
By Juan Carlos Llorca
The Associated Press
Hidden for three decades in a landfill deep in the New Mexico desert lie thousands of Atari cartridges from what is widely believed to be worst video game ever made — or so the urban legend goes. A group of filmmakers hopes to get to the bottom of the mystery Saturday by digging up the concretecovered landfill in search of up to a million discarded copies of E.T. The Extraterrestrial that the game’s maker wanted to hide forever. The game and its contribution to the demise of Atari have been the source of fascination for video game enthusiasts for 30 years, and the search for the cartridges will be featured in an upcoming documentary about the biggest video game company of the early ’80s. “Bottom line, this is just trash. But there is a legend in it, we want to unlock that legend, that mystery,” a spokeswoman for the public relations firm working on behalf of Xbox Entertainment Studios, one of the companies developing the film.
Comics B-12
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Crosswords B-7, B-11
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Solar Fiesta
Crews begin digging at the old Alamogordo landfill Friday, to search for copies of Atari’s E.T. The Extraterrestrial game purportedly buried there in the 1980s. The game is considered among gamers to be one of the worst ever and is believed to have contributed to the demise of Atari. JOHN BEAR/ALAMAGORDO DAILY NEWS
The documentary is expected to be released later this year on Microsoft’s Xbox game consoles. The event is expected to draw hundreds of video game enthusiasts, pop culture fans and self-described geeks to Alamogordo. Whether — and most importantly, why — Atari decided to bury thousands or millions of copies of
Lotteries A-2
Opinions A-11
the failed game is part of the urban legend and much speculation on Internet blog posts and forums. Kristen Keller, a spokeswoman at Atari, said “nobody here has any idea what that’s about.” The company has no “corporate knowledge” about the Alamogordo burial. Atari
Sports B-1
Please see gAMES, Page A-4
Time Out B-11
Family A-9
BREAKING NEWS AT WWW.SANTAFENEWMEXICAN.COM
Workshops, a public forum and solar-product demonstrations occur between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.; Santa Fe Community College, 6401 Richards Ave., no charge, continues Sunday.
Home: Earth Day at the Railyard Wise Fool New Mexico’s giantpuppet procession opens the activities at 11:30 a.m.; live music, interactive art activities and workshops are held through the day, Railyard Park, 740 Cerrillos Road, no charge. More events in Calendar, A-2 and Fridays in Pasatiempo
Two sections, 24 pages TV Book, 32 pages 165th year, No. 116 Publication No. 596-440