Lawmakers take education secretary to task over proposed 180-day rule change

State Education Secretary Arsenio Romero sat in front of the powerful bicameral Legislative Finance Committee on Thursday morning to present a budget proposal for the coming fiscal year.

But when his roughly 50-minute presentation was over, he wasn’t met with a flurry of comments about the New Mexico Public Education Department’s multi-billion-dollar budget ask.

Instead, many of the lawmakers on the committee took to grilling him about a controversial rule the PED has proposed that would require public schools to spend at least 180 days in school outside of teachers’ professional development or other work time.

The rule also would restrict school districts that have implemented four-day school weeks, requiring all public schools to spend more than 50% of their time on five-day school week schedules.

Eight hundred written public comments had been submitted to the PED about the proposal as of Friday. Many of those public commenters decried the rule, and during Thursday’s LFC meeting, lawmakers also had little to nothing good to say about the proposal.

“You’re making a mistake right now,” LFC Chairman Sen. George Muñoz, D-Gallup, told Romero. “House Bill 130 … was all vetted through the Legislature … a long-term approach on how to make that change, and we get a report and you guys want to change it by rule. It’s not gonna work.”

The proposed rule comes after lawmakers earlier this year passed legislation, known as House Bill 130, increasing the amount of instructional time students must spend in school to 1,140 hours while allowing some educator professional work time during instructional hours.

Previously, first through sixth graders were required to go to school for at least 990 hours per year, and secondary students for 1,080.

But the PED has argued that many school districts and charter schools actually lost time with students, and proposed the 180-day rule as a way of getting it back.

“There are many other things that play into why schools can either be successful or not. But in all of my experiences, having more time with teachers has always been a positive thing,” Romero told lawmakers. “The 180 rule is not to pick on four-day districts — it is to increase instructional time for students and teachers across New Mexico.”

In some cases, rural school districts implement four-day school week schedules to accommodate students’ and teachers’ long commutes to school.

Rep. Gail Armstrong, R-Magdalena, recounted a similar experience in her elementary school years and worried the rule would strip such districts of local control to determine what works best for them.

One of HB 130’s sponsors, Rep. Joy Garratt, D-Albuquerque, pointed out the legislation represented a year’s worth of feedback from people across the state and questioned the effort to quickly change how class-time requirements work .

“It wasn’t just something that came out of the head of Zeus,” she said. “And so I was appalled when, after only four months of implementation … Suddenly, a rule is being proposed without any discussion ahead of time. I’m deeply troubled by that.”

Citing the flood of public comments the department has received on the proposed rule, Romero said he welcomed feedback and that it will inform the department’s decisions on how to move forward.

“We’ve got a lot of it, and I really love that we have a lot of it coming from all over the state of New Mexico,” he said. “I am looking forward to looking at every single piece of feedback as we move forward.”

The PED will hold a public hearing on the rule at 1:30 p.m. Monday at 300 Don Gaspar Avenue in Santa Fe. From there, the department has said it will tweak the rule based on the feedback it receives before making a decision on approving the rule.

If approved, the rule would go into effect for next school year.