While touting new standards-based initiatives to improve New Mexico’s public schools, state Secretary of Education Hanna Skandera gave three failing charter schools a pass, in defiance of state regulators.

Santa Fe Public Schools is spending $165,000 to acquire what educational reformers usually don’t prescribe for struggling districts: more administrators.

Los Alamos National Laboratory and its partners in the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities are preparing to reach out to northern New Mexico contractors in anticipation of beginning construction soon of the lab’s new plutonium pit processing plant.

Last fall, forensic psychiatrist Susan Cave met with juvenile probation officers, social workers, representatives of OptumHealth—the company that holds the purse strings for public psychiatric care in New Mexico—and the adoptive mom of a troubled teenage boy. Everyone but Optum and an out-of-state doctor who conferenced with the Optum reps by phone agreed the young man needed to be treated at a residential facility, but Optum declined to cover it.

At the Sept. 20 meeting of the Santa Fe Public Schools Board of Education, SFPS Chief Operations Officer Kristy Janda Wagner presented a “reprioritization” of the existing Facilities Master Plan, which outlines the district’s construction and renovation plans.

On Sept. 6, after trying to reach an agreement for 18 months, Washington, DC-based Pegasus Global LLC—a federal Department of Defense contractor—announced a partnership with the state Economic Development Department to develop a high-tech “ghost town” to test experimental technologies. On Aug. 16, the EDD signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Pegasus to cooperatively perform a feasibility study for the ambitious $200 million project.

The state Department of Health will work toward voluntary federal accreditation with the help of two current and former Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center contractors.

Public health accreditation is one requirement attached to a $300,000 federal grant DOH received in September. The Public Health Accreditation Board is a new project designed to recognize state and local health departments for doing a good job while giving them an incentive to improve.

An embattled Santa Fe charter school’s first Parent, Teacher, Student Coalition meeting this year got off to a dramatic start when a member of the school’s leadership stormed out mid-meeting. 

On Sept. 26, city officials revealed details of a $50 million potential bond package. Above, see the breakdown for the bigger chunk of the package, a $30 million (not all of which has been allotted to projects) general obligation bond that may require raising property taxes.

After all the lip service paid to the importance of renewable energy, and after the disaster in Fukushima, Japan, raised awareness of the danger inherent in nuclear technology, investing in clean energy might seem a logical goal for the DOE.