M Manni in ng throws 500th career touchdown pass Sports, B-1
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City launches youth mentorship program Inspire Santa Fe will match students and adult professionals with similar interests. EDUCATION, A-8
EBOLA OUTBREAK
Local artist immortalized Victim’s at Washington memorial odyssey to Texas has roots in conflict
Protesters at odds over pullback plan Hong Kong demonstrators agree to remove some barriers, but appear divided ahead of government deadline. PAGE A-2
Producers create pot-themed show
Man came to U.S. to reunite with girlfriend, son after 16-year split
Taos pair try to help entrepreneurs launch pot products. PAGE A-10
By Kevin Sack The New York Times
Skandera critic once backed her eval system
ABOVE: President Barack Obama speaks Sunday during the dedication of the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial in Washington. In his speech, Obama talked about a quote from Santa Clara Pueblo artist Michael Naranjo, who was wounded and blinded by a grenade while serving with the U.S. Army in Vietnam. SAMMY DALLAL/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
I
n his battle with the truth, teachers union executive Charles Bowyer tells quite a story about the battle he’s fighting. Bowyer, executive director of the National Education Association New Mexico, describes himself as an opponent of the bureaucratic woman who imposed the controversial system for evaluating the state’s teachers. That would be Hanna Skandera, secretary-desigMilan nate of the Public Simonich Education DepartRingside Seat ment. In reality, Bowyer, more than anyone else, helped Skandera establish teacher evaluations tied to student scores on standardized tests. As though that history did not exist, Bowyer and the National Education Association filed a lawsuit last week asking a judge to declare the evaluation system illegal. Bowyer conveniently left the main criticism of Skandera to a friend, Betty Patterson, his union’s president. “Ms. Skandera and the Public
Please see RINGSIDE, Page A-5
LEFT: Naranjo poses Sunday next to his quote at the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial. COURTESY LAURIE NARANJO
New Mexican blinded by grenade in Vietnam among 18 quoted at site dedicated to vets wounded in service By Robert Nott The New Mexican
s he patrolled the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam looking for the Viet Cong soldiers who had shelled his base with mortar fire the day before, U.S. Army soldier Michael Naranjo recalls, Jan. 8, 1968, started out as a calm day. But then the shooting started. Caught in an open rice field, Naranjo bolted for some nearby jungle coverage as several of his Army buddies went down in the firefight. Within seconds, a hand grenade
A
was lobbed at him. It exploded, blinding Naranjo and shattering one of his hands. “And then I wasn’t sure how I was going to live,” the 70-year-old Santa Clara Pueblo artist recalled by phone late last week. “But at the time, I knew I wanted to live.” On Sunday, Naranjo was one of more than 3,000 people, including many veterans, who attended the dedication ceremony of the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial, a monument of granite and glass with a five-point-starshaped fountain (representing five branches of the military) that was
erected close to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. One wall of the monument features 18 quotes from veterans. Among them is this thought from Naranjo: “When you’re young, you’re invincible. You’re immortal. I thought I’d come back. Perhaps I wouldn’t, there was that thought, too, but I had this feeling that I would come back. Underneath that feeling, there was another, that maybe I wouldn’t be quite the same, but I felt I’d make it back.” Naranjo made it back. And on
Please see MEMORIAL, Page A-4
Obituaries
When you’re young, you’re invincible. You’re immortal. I thought I’d come back. “ Perhaps I wouldn’t, there was that thought, too, but I had this feeling that I would
Carolun Frucht, 83, Oct. 3 Charles F. Jackline, 90, Santa Fe, Sept. 27
come back. Underneath that feeling, there was another, that maybe I wouldn’t be quite the same, but I felt I’d make it back.” — Michael Naranjo, artist and veteran
Descript gherey. High XX, low XX. PAGE A-12
Pasapick www.pasatiempomagazine.com
By Robert Nott
Saving Endangered Languages An illustrated lecture by K. David Harrison and Gregory Anyderson of the National Geographic Society and Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, 7 p.m., Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St., $10, ticketssantafe.org, 988-1234.
Index
Calendar A-2
Classifieds B-6
The New Mexican
The superintendent of Española Public Schools thinks the troubled Cariños Charter School might be violating school attendance laws because it no longer has a permanent facility with classrooms where students can meet. The state’s Construction Industries Division in late August “redtagged” the Cariños facility — a former middle school — citing
Comics B-12
Main office: 983-3303 Late paper: 986-3010 News tips: 986-3035
Crosswords B-7, B-11
about 24 safety violations. Vernon Jaramillo, the school’s chancellor, said in an email that Cariños has increased its experiential lessons and field trips to keep the kids engaged and learning until they have a new school building. “The teachers and staff continue to be dedicated to the mission of our charter,” Jaramillo said. The school hopes to start busing its students to a vacant building on the El Rito campus of Northern New Mexico College. In the meantime, Superintendent Daniel Trujillo said he doesn’t know where the Cariños students have been going to school for the past month. “Right now those kids are not in compliance with state law with regards to
Education A-8
Life & Science A-9
El Nuevo A-7
For young immigrants, smugglers’ promises can lead to peril Children often exploited for money from families By Damien Cave and Frances Robles The New York Times
mandatory school attendance or submitting a waiver for additional time or a plan,” he said. “We have a real difficult time with that.” Under state law, schools are required to enforce compulsory school attendance laws. The district approved the charter for the dual-language school, which serves about 200 students in grades K-8, in 2006, a year after it first applied. Relations since then have not always been warm. First District Court Judge Sarah Singleton recently ordered Española Public Schools to pay for buses to transport the charter school students to El Rito. Cariños’ attor-
Please see CHARTER, Page A-4
Please see SMUGGLERS, Page A-4
Superintendent challenges El Rito charter school without building Cariños chancellor says students are still engaged in learning
Please see EBOLA, Page A-4
EL PARAÍSO, Guatemala — The smugglers advertised on the radio in the spring: “Do you want to live better? Come with me.” Cecilia, a restless wisp of a girl, heard the pitch and ached to go. Her stepfather had been murdered, forcing her, her mother and four younger siblings into her aunt’s tiny home, with just three beds for 10 people. A smuggler offered them a loan of $7,000 for Cecilia’s journey, with the property as a guarantee. The trip lasted nearly a month, devolving from a journey of want and fear into an outright abduction by smugglers in the United States. Freedom came only after an extra $1,000 payment, made at a gas station in Fort Myers, Fla. Now in Miami, Cecilia, 16, is one of more than 50,000 unaccompanied minors who have come to the United States illegally from Central America in less than a year. Though the number of new arrivals has been declining, the Obama administration says it is determined to “confront the smugglers of these unaccompanied children,” and the “cartels who tax or exploit them in their passage.”
PAGE A-10
Today
DALLAS — The murderous civil war that terrorized Liberia from 1989 to 2003 left at least 5 percent of the population dead, and sent wave after wave of refugees to neighboring countries. To escape the ethnic and political turmoil, more than 700,000 fled from a nation that had barely 2 million residents when the conflict began. Among them were Thomas Eric Duncan, the man who last week became the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S., and Louise Troh, the woman he had come to Dallas to visit. After meeting in the early 1990s in a refugee encampment near the Ivory Coast border town of Danané, the two Liberian nationals started a relationship and bore a son, several family members said. It is not clear what drove the couple apart — Duncan, 42, who is fighting for his life at a Dallas hospital, has not spoken publicly, and Troh, 54, who will be quarantined for another two weeks, declined to discuss their history. But starting in 1998, when Troh left for the United States — first settling in Boston, and then in Dallas with another Liberian man — they began a
Opinions A-11
Sports B-1
Time Out B-11
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Two sections, 24 pages 165th year, No. 279 Publication No. 596-440