School districts scramble to finalize budgets, calendars with 180-day rule on pause

May 6—If Wagon Mound Public Schools were to shift to a five-day school week, Superintendent Anita Romero anticipated she would lose all but one of her district's six high school teachers.

She said she'd expect only two of her nine elementary school teachers to weather the transition. The others would quit rather than make the daily commute — roughly 86 miles roundtrip — from Las Vegas, N.M., one more day per week.

That's Romero's "biggest concern" with the Public Education Department's rule mandating 180 instructional days for the 2024-25 school year: It will render a four-day school week impossible and drive her staff out of the rural northeast New Mexico district.

"You're going to leave me with three teachers to teach 72 kids? Really?" the superintendent said.

In April, Wagon Mound submitted its budget and calendar for next school year to the state Public Education Department. Both operate under the assumption the district will be able to stick with its typical schedule of four-day school weeks, Romero said.

That assumption may yet turn out to be correct: On Friday, 5th Judicial District Judge Dustin Hunter issued a temporary restraining order in a lawsuit seeking to halt the 180-day rule, brought by New Mexico School Superintendents Association and more than 50 school districts across the state against the Public Education Department.

The order prohibits the Public Education Department from "requiring Plaintiffs to submit operating budgets and school calendars complying with the new 180-day requirement."

In an interview Monday, Public Education Secretary Arsenio Romero declined to comment on the pending litigation, though his department will host "office hours" as districts and charter schools build their budgets amid the uncertainty.

"We're going to continue to do the work here and support districts," Arsenio Romero said.

All of that means schools officials can continue with the status quo — in some cases, calendaring and budgeting for fewer than 180 days of school — or they can wait for the next hearing in the case, scheduled for May 13 in Clovis, to make decisions on the documentation they'll submit to the department for approval.

Santa Fe Public Schools plans to do the latter, despite initial plans to finalize the district's budget this week, Superintendent Hilario "Larry" Chavez said in an interview Monday.

"We're going to wait," Chavez said. "We're going to wait to present a budget for approval to our board after the hearing on May 13."

In addition to the usual hubbub of graduations and field days, the final few weeks of the 2023-24 school year have brought a complicated confluence of changes and decisions regarding next school year.

The superintendents association's lawsuit comes during "peak budget season," said Stan Rounds, executive director of the New Mexico Coalition of Educational Leaders. Schools and districts across the state are building their budgets, a process some school officials say is complicated by the extra school days often required under the rule.

The temporary restraining order allows schools and districts to submit school calendars and budgets that are out-of-compliance with the 180-day rule, Rounds said, though it's only valid until a hearing in the case.

"Until there's a different kind of order from a court, that's how they can proceed," he said.

The May 13 hearing may prove pivotal. It will allow the Public Education Department to "show cause, if they have any, as to why this Temporary Restraining Order should not continue as a preliminary injunction pending final determination of the merits of this cause," Hunter's order states.

If the temporary restraining order becomes a preliminary injunction, it would block the agency from implementing the 180-day rule until litigation has concluded — buying districts some time and removing the immediate budgetary hurdle posed by extra instructional days for the 2024-25 school year.

"Whatever is decided Monday will likely prevail for all of the budget season," Rounds said.

For her part, Wagon Mound's Anita Romero said she feels confident in her district's decision to submit a budget based on four-day school weeks.

"This is the way I look at it: I think that everything that we — the superintendents and our association head — gave the attorneys, we have a very good case," she said. "And so I feel very confident that the court will rule in our favor."