Rio Rancho - EdTribune NM - New Mexico Education Data

Explore Academy Grew 612% in a Decade. Then 2026 Happened.

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Explore Academy^↗ opened in 2014 with a narrow pitch: a high school in Albuquerque where students pick short themed seminars instead of following a fixed course sequence. It enrolled 199 students in the first year the state data covers. A decade later, the flagship campus has 1,418 students, a K-12 grade span, an "A" rating from the Public Education Department, and a 612.6% enrollment increase without a single year of decline. Only three other entities in New Mexico can claim an unbroken growth streak of eight or more years.

The growth story gets more complicated when the lens widens. Explore now operates three campuses across the state: Albuquerque, Las Cruces^↗ (opened 2022), and Rio Rancho^↗ (opened 2023). As a network, it peaked at 2,442 students in 2025. In 2026, the combined enrollment fell to 2,318, a 5.1% decline and the network's first contraction.

A flagship that keeps climbing

The Albuquerque campus has defied every statewide trend. While Albuquerque Public Schools^↗ lost 19,579 students over the same period, a 21.2% decline, Explore ABQ added 1,219. The charter now enrolls 1.95% of APS's total headcount, up from 0.22% in 2016.

The trajectory has two distinct phases. From 2016 to 2018, growth was modest: 13 students, then 46. In 2019, the campus nearly doubled, jumping from 258 to 441. That acceleration continued through the pandemic, when many traditional districts were losing students in droves. Between 2021 and 2022 alone, the ABQ campus gained 380 students, a 58.8% single-year surge. The gains have tapered since then: 178 in 2023, 120 in 2024, 89 in 2025, and just five in 2026. The flagship may be approaching a plateau.

The original campus served grades 9 through 11. By 2024, it had expanded to K-12, with a dedicated elementary campus at Journal Center now listed for sale at $10.95 million. Head administrator Jacob Kolander confirmed expansion plans but said "nothing has been finalized."

The network's uneven geography

The expansion beyond Albuquerque has produced mixed results.

The Las Cruces campus opened in 2022 with 94 students and grew rapidly, reaching 599 by 2025. Then it shed 174 students in a single year, dropping 29.0% to 425 in 2026. The campus is currently undergoing charter renewal review by the Public Education Department. Las Cruces Public Schools^↗, the traditional district in that market, also declined, losing 2,809 students since 2016 to reach 22,156.

The Rio Rancho campus opened in August 2023, converting a former Concentrix call center into a K-6 school with class sizes capped at 14 to 16 students. It enrolled 273 students in its first full year and has grown to 475 in 2026, a 74.0% increase. Rio Rancho Public Schools^↗, its host district, has lost 667 students since 2016 and now enrolls 16,245.

The stacked area chart makes the 2026 contraction visible: the Las Cruces wedge shrinks sharply while the Albuquerque base barely moves. The network's growth over the past four years was primarily driven by new campus openings, not by organic expansion of the flagship.

The 2026 reversal in context

The network's first decline does not appear to be an Explore-specific phenomenon. Mission Achievement and Success, New Mexico's largest charter entity at 1,898 students, lost 338 students in 2026, a 15.1% drop. The charter sector as a whole contracted for the first time in the data, falling from 22,242 to 21,734 students while its share of total enrollment held steady at 7.3%.

One possible driver is the maturation of pandemic-era enrollment shifts. Several charters that grew rapidly during 2020-2022, when families sought alternatives to closed or remote traditional schools, may be experiencing a reversion as those students graduate or return to traditional districts. The Las Cruces campus's 29% single-year decline is harder to explain by maturation alone. It may reflect growing pains specific to a young campus still building community roots in a smaller market than Albuquerque.

Where Explore fits in the charter landscape

Even after the 2026 decline, the Explore network accounts for 10.7% of all charter enrollment in New Mexico. The ABQ campus alone is the state's fourth-largest charter entity.

The top tier of New Mexico charters is dominated by brick-and-mortar schools with distinctive instructional models. Mission Achievement and Success (1,898) runs extended-day schedules. Pecos Cyber Academy (1,616) and NM Connections Academy (1,508) are virtual. Explore's "flavored" curriculum, where students choose themed seminars that rotate every six weeks, occupies a niche between traditional instruction and online learning.

Since 2019, Explore ABQ has added more students in absolute terms (+977) than any other charter entity in the state. Hozho Academy (+729, a 592.7% increase) and ABQ School of Excellence (+415) are the next-largest growers.

A demographic profile unlike the state

Explore Academy's student body does not mirror New Mexico. In 2019, when the network was a single Albuquerque campus, 51.0% of students were white and 37.0% were Hispanic. By 2026, that had shifted: 33.9% white, 56.0% Hispanic. The network's demographics have moved toward the state average but remain significantly whiter. New Mexico's public school enrollment is 64.6% Hispanic and 19.6% white.

The demographic gap was a central concern when Explore attempted to open a Santa Fe campus in 2023. The Public Education Department's Charter Schools Division noted that the application projected 30% white students, double the 15% rate at Santa Fe Public Schools, and questioned the school's decision not to offer bilingual instruction. The application was withdrawn before a final vote. A new notice of intent for a Santa Fe campus was filed with the Public Education Commission in late 2024.

Separately, the network's special education enrollment has grown faster than total enrollment. In 2019, 9.3% of Explore students received special education services (41 of 441). By 2026, that rate was 15.7% (365 of 2,318), closer to the statewide rate and a sign that the school is serving a broader cross-section of student needs than in its early years.

What 2027 will test

The question facing Explore Academy is whether its model can sustain itself at scale across multiple markets. The ABQ flagship gained just five students in 2026. The K-5 campus is for sale. Las Cruces lost nearly a third of its enrollment. Rio Rancho is still growing, but from a small base and with a grade span that has not yet reached middle school age.

The network has also signaled ambitions beyond New Mexico. Explore Academy campuses now operate in Las Vegas and Peoria, Arizona, making it a multi-state charter operator. Whether the New Mexico network can hold 2,300 students while the organization's attention spreads across state lines will be the enrollment story to watch in 2027.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

One in Six New Mexico Students Is an English Learner

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

New Mexico lost 36,778 students between 2019 and 2026, an 11% decline that touched nearly every district in the state. English learner enrollment moved in the opposite direction. The state counted 53,149 ELL students in 2025-26, up 2,197 from 50,952 seven years earlier. That 4.3% gain against an 11% total loss produced a 15.3 percentage point divergence: the students learning English grew while the system around them shrank.

The gap is not abstract. It means 33 districts now have English learner shares above 20%. It means Hatch Valley^↗, a small district on the southern border, enrolls more ELL students than non-ELL. It means Carlsbad^↗, deep in Permian Basin oil country, saw its ELL population more than double in six years. And it means New Mexico's $4.4 billion K-12 system faces a structural mismatch: declining headcounts that reduce per-pupil funding and rising service demands that increase per-pupil costs.

The divergence in numbers

Between 2019 and 2026, non-ELL enrollment fell by 38,975 students, a 13.7% decline. ELL enrollment added 2,197 students. The effect on share was steady: English learners rose from 15.2% of total enrollment in 2019 to a peak of 18.2% in 2024-25, before dipping slightly to 17.8% in 2025-26.

That trajectory puts New Mexico well above the national average. Nationally, about 10.6% of public school students were English learners as of fall 2021, the most recent federal figure. New Mexico's 17.8% rate is nearly double that.

The year-over-year pattern reveals two distinct phases. From 2021 through 2023, ELL enrollment surged, adding 4,252 students in 2022 alone, a post-COVID rebound that exceeded the pre-pandemic baseline. Growth then plateaued: the 2025 count of 55,798 was only 83 students above 2023. In 2026, the trend reversed. ELL enrollment fell by 2,649 students, a 4.7% drop, the largest single-year decline in the dataset.

Where the growth is coming from

ELL enrollment can rise for two distinct reasons: new students arriving who speak a language other than English, or existing students being identified as English learners through screening. The data cannot distinguish between the two, but geographic patterns offer clues.

The strongest ELL growth is concentrated in southeastern New Mexico's Permian Basin, where oil and gas extraction has drawn thousands of immigrant workers and their families. Carlsbad^↗ went from 595 ELL students in 2019 (7.4% of enrollment) to 1,337 in 2026 (17.8%), a 125% increase. Hobbs^↗ grew from 1,889 to 2,347, a 24% gain that pushed its ELL share to 23.5%. Lovington^↗ rose from 933 to 1,030, reaching 31.2%.

This pattern is consistent with arrival-driven growth. The Permian Basin has experienced sustained labor migration, particularly from Mexico and Central America, as oil production expanded. In Lea County, where Hobbs and Lovington are located, Hispanics and Latinos now account for as much as 70% of the population, compared with 40% two decades ago.

The border region tells a different story. Gadsden^↗, Deming^↗, and Hatch Valley^↗ have always had high ELL concentrations, reflecting longstanding cross-border communities. Hatch Valley's share rose from 43.5% to 52.3%, but its absolute ELL count grew by just 25 students. The share increase is largely a denominator effect: total enrollment fell while ELL enrollment held steady.

Improved identification may also be at work. The 2018 Yazzie/Martinez ruling found that New Mexico had failed to meet its obligations to English learners under the Bilingual Multicultural Education Act and federal civil rights requirements. The court ordered the state to address these failures, and subsequent reforms expanded screening and identification efforts. Districts that had previously under-identified ELL students may have begun counting them more systematically, inflating apparent growth.

Both forces are probably at work. Oil country growth is primarily arrival-driven. The statewide share increase, particularly in districts without obvious immigration drivers, likely reflects expanded screening.

The funding equation

New Mexico's legislature recognized the structural tension this year. HB 63, signed into law in 2025, creates a standalone English Learner Program Unit in the state's funding formula. Previously, ELL students were bundled into the broader "at-risk" funding category, diluting resources among multiple populations with different needs.

"By having it as its own category, I feel that this will help to ensure that we're being equitable." — Michael Rodriguez, executive director of Dual Language Education of New Mexico, quoted in the Los Alamos Daily Post

The new formula uses a three-year average ELL rate multiplied by a 0.33 factor to generate additional program units. For districts like Hatch Valley and Deming, where more than four in ten students are English learners, the standalone multiplier could deliver meaningful new revenue. For districts like Rio Rancho^↗, where ELL share is 5.8%, the impact will be smaller.

But funding is only half the constraint. The state faces a bilingual teacher retention problem. A Legislative Finance Committee program evaluation found 4,055 teachers in New Mexico hold bilingual endorsements, but only about 20% actually teach in bilingual programs. The gap is not supply but willingness: bilingual-endorsed teachers report being asked to translate materials and interpret at meetings without additional compensation, creating a disincentive to work in the programs that need them most.

Where concentration is highest

Thirty-three districts had ELL shares above 20% in 2025-26. The geography splits into three clusters.

The border corridor, from Gadsden (42.4%) through Deming (44.0%) to Hatch Valley (52.3%), has maintained high ELL shares for decades. These are communities where Spanish is the predominant home language and cross-border enrollment is common.

The Permian Basin, including Hobbs (23.5%), Lovington (31.2%), and Carlsbad (17.8%), represents the fastest growth. Carlsbad's ELL share was 7.4% in 2019. It has more than doubled.

Albuquerque^↗ anchors the system. With 14,624 ELL students, it accounts for 27.5% of the state's entire ELL population. Its ELL share crossed 20% in 2024-25 and held at 20.2% in 2025-26. One in five APS students is an English learner.

The 2026 reversal

The 2,649-student ELL decline in 2026 broke a four-year growth streak and deserves scrutiny. Albuquerque alone lost 841 ELL students, accounting for nearly a third of the statewide drop. Gallup^↗ lost 477. Gadsden lost 355. Las Cruces^↗ lost 315.

Several explanations are plausible. Reclassification: students who reached proficiency thresholds on the ACCESS assessment exited ELL status, and the exit cohort exceeded the entry cohort for the first time since the pandemic. Immigration enforcement: increased federal enforcement activity in 2025-26 may have deterred enrollment among immigrant families. Total enrollment decline: a shrinking denominator means fewer new kindergartners entering the pipeline, including fewer who qualify as ELL.

The data cannot isolate a single cause. What it does show is that ELL growth in New Mexico is not a one-way escalator. The 2021 COVID dip and the 2026 reversal both demonstrate that external forces, from pandemic disruption to federal policy, can shift the trajectory sharply in a single year.

A system built for decline, serving growth

New Mexico's education system is shrinking. Total enrollment has fallen nearly every year since 2019 and now sits at 298,353, its lowest point in the data. The state lost 36,778 students in seven years. Within that contraction, English learner enrollment grew by 2,197, special education enrollment grew by 7,779 (to 20.5% of all students), and the instructional programs these students receive carry higher per-pupil costs than general education.

The budget pressure is direct. Declining headcounts reduce total funding. Rising shares of students in specialized programs increase average costs. HB 63 begins to address the ELL piece, but whether new formula units translate into bilingual classrooms, trained teachers, and effective programming depends on districts' ability to recruit and retain bilingual educators, something the state has struggled with for years.

Hatch Valley now has more English learners than non-English learners. Carlsbad's ELL population more than doubled in six years. In Hobbs, nearly one in four students is learning English. These are not districts that can wait for policy to catch up. They need bilingual teachers now, in buildings that are losing general education students, in a state where 80% of bilingual-endorsed teachers do not teach in bilingual programs. The 53,149 English learners enrolled in 2025-26 are not going anywhere. The system around them keeps shrinking.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Fewer Than One in Five

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

New Mexico has never been a majority-white state. But it has now crossed a threshold that would have seemed improbable even a decade ago: white students represent just 19.6% of public school enrollment, the first time the share has fallen below one in five. The 58,393 white students enrolled in 2025-26 are 20,424 fewer than the 78,817 enrolled in 2018-19, a 25.9% decline. Over the same period, total enrollment fell 11.0%. White families are leaving New Mexico's public schools at more than twice the overall rate.

This is not a single-year anomaly. White enrollment has declined in every year of available data, dropping from 23.5% in 2019 to 19.6% in 2026. The decline continued through COVID, through a brief enrollment plateau in 2021-22, and through the introduction of a new multiracial category that reclassified some previously white-counted students. Even controlling for that reclassification, the trajectory is unambiguous.

A 3.9-point slide in seven years

White enrollment fell every year from 2019 to 2026. The steepest single-year drop came during COVID: 7,508 white students vanished between 2019-20 and 2020-21, a 9.7% loss in a single year. That year alone erased a decade's worth of typical attrition. The count stabilized briefly in 2021-22 (losing just 177 students) before resuming losses of 2,000 to 6,000 per year.

The share decline, from 23.5% to 19.6%, amounts to 3.9 percentage points. To put that in context: Hispanic students, who make up nearly two-thirds of enrollment, saw their share rise 2.8 points over the same period (61.8% to 64.6%) despite also losing students in absolute terms. Hispanic enrollment fell by 14,172 students, a 6.8% decline. Native American enrollment fell by 5,432 students, a 15.6% decline, dropping from 10.4% to 9.9% of the total.

In short, every major racial group is shrinking in absolute numbers. White enrollment is shrinking fastest.

The 55% problem

White students made up 19.6% of enrollment in 2026 but accounted for 55.5% of total enrollment losses since 2019. That ratio, nearly three to one, means white attrition is the single largest driver of New Mexico's overall enrollment decline even though white students are a relatively small share of the student body.

One caveat matters here. In 2025, New Mexico's Public Education Department began reporting a multiracial category for the first time, and 7,221 students appeared in it immediately. By 2026, the count was 7,441. Prior to 2025, the multiracial category did not exist in the data, meaning these students were previously counted under other race categories, likely including white. Some portion of the apparent 2023-to-2025 white decline (5,809 students) reflects reclassification rather than actual departures.

The pre-reclassification period tells a cleaner story. From 2019 to 2023, before the multiracial category existed, white enrollment fell from 78,817 to 67,154, a loss of 11,663 students (14.8%). That decline cannot be attributed to a reporting change.

Where the losses concentrate

Albuquerque^↗ Public Schools alone lost 6,078 white students since 2019, accounting for 29.8% of the statewide white loss. APS white enrollment fell from 19,723 to 13,645, a 30.8% decline. The district's white share dropped from 21.9% to 18.8%.

Rio Rancho^↗, the state's second-largest suburban district, lost 1,690 white students (29.0%), with its white share falling from 33.2% to 25.5%. Las Cruces^↗ lost 1,439 (30.1%). Alamogordo^↗, a military-adjacent district, lost 1,152 white students, a 38.1% decline that dropped its white share from 47.3% to 36.3%.

The pattern is uniform: among districts with more than 2,000 students, every single one lost white enrollment. The percentage declines range from 6.8% (Gadsden, where white students were already a small fraction) to 38.1% (Alamogordo). No large district bucked the trend.

The charter gap

Charter schools in New Mexico are substantially whiter than traditional districts. In 2026, charters enrolled students who were 24.3% white, compared with 19.2% in traditional districts, a 5.1 percentage-point gap. In 2019 the gap was wider: 31.3% versus 23.2%.

Both sectors lost white share, but charters held on to a larger proportion of their white students. Charter white enrollment grew from 4,231 to 5,292 between 2019 and 2026, even as traditional district white enrollment fell from 74,586 to 53,062. White families moving into the charter sector partially offset what would otherwise be an even steeper traditional-district decline.

What is driving this

Three forces are plausibly at work, and the data cannot cleanly separate them.

The strongest evidence points to demographics. New Mexico's births have been declining steadily since 2007, when the state's total fertility rate was 2,308 per 1,000 women of reproductive age. By 2024, that rate had fallen to 1,562. White births represent a smaller share of the state's births (25.8%, per March of Dimes PeriStats data for 2021-2023) than white students represent of current enrollment (19.6%). That 6.2 percentage-point gap between the birth share and the enrollment share suggests that the pipeline of white kindergarteners entering public schools is smaller than the pipeline of white 12th graders leaving, but also that white families are more likely to opt out of public schools altogether.

Outmigration adds a second layer. New Mexico has run a negative domestic migration balance every year since 2012, meaning more residents leave for other states than arrive from them. Robert Rhatigan, the state demographer at the University of New Mexico, told the Santa Fe New Mexican that the state is now dependent on migration for growth because "New Mexico now sees more deaths than births each year." Census estimates show 2,267 residents left the state on net in the most recent year. The Census Bureau does not publish outmigration by race at the state level, so the degree to which white families are overrepresented among those leaving is unknown.

"Births have been in a slow steady decline since 2008 with women having fewer children each year. This trend should continue not only because women are having less children, but also because we have less women of childbearing age every year." -- Dr. Jacqueline Miller, UNM Geospatial and Population Studies

A third factor is school choice. White students are overrepresented in New Mexico's charter sector (24.3% white versus 19.2% in traditional districts). No statewide data tracks enrollment in private schools by race, so the full scope of white families choosing alternatives to traditional public schools remains unquantifiable. The Rio Grande Foundation has argued that New Mexico's enrollment decline reflects broader dissatisfaction with the state's education system, though this argument applies to all racial groups, not specifically white families.

The 20 holdouts

Only 20 districts in New Mexico had a white-majority student body in 2026. The largest was Los Alamos^↗, the scientific laboratory community, at 51.8% white with 1,826 white students. The next largest was 21st Century Public Academy, a charter school with 339 students (92.6% white). After that, every white-majority district enrolled fewer than 300 students. Cloudcroft^↗ (66.7% white, 254 students), Melrose (70.6%, 192 students), Dora (73.2%, 150 students): these are small rural communities, not population centers.

In districts enrolling more than 2,000 students, the aggregate white share was 18.8%, even lower than the statewide figure. The white student population in New Mexico is increasingly dispersed across districts where it is a small and shrinking minority.

Below 15% by 2035

UNM population researchers project that New Mexico's youth population (ages 0-24) will decline 20% over the next 20 years, driven by falling fertility and persistent domestic outmigration. The white share of that declining youth population will almost certainly continue to fall, given the gap between white births (25.8% of all births) and white enrollment (19.6%). At the current pace of share decline, roughly 0.6 percentage points per year, white enrollment would drop below 15% before 2035.

Charter white enrollment grew by 1,061 students since 2019 while traditional districts lost 21,524. That means roughly 95% of white attrition is not showing up anywhere in the public system. Some of those families moved to Texas or Colorado. Some switched to private school or homeschooling. Some aged out without younger siblings to replace them. The enrollment data tracks departure, not destination. What it does show is a public school system that will look, within a decade, almost nothing like the one that existed when most of its buildings were built.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Six Years After COVID, 93 Districts Still Haven't Recovered

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The pandemic was supposed to be a temporary shock. Albuquerque^↗ lost 6,684 students between 2019 and 2021, an extraordinary loss for any two-year period. But the five years since have been worse: APS shed another 10,983 students after schools fully reopened, bringing the district to 72,573, a 19.6% decline from its 2019 enrollment. The COVID crater, it turns out, was just the first drop on a much longer fall.

New Mexico enrolled 298,353 students in 2025-26, down 36,778 from its 2019 total of 335,131. That is an 11.0% decline in seven years. The state has not recovered a single net student since the pandemic. It has lost more.

The gap that kept growing

The state was already declining before COVID. Between 2016 and 2019, New Mexico lost 4,482 students, about 1,500 per year. Then the pandemic hit, and enrollment fell by 14,323 in a single year (2020-21), the largest one-year drop in the dataset.

What followed was not recovery. In 2021-22, the state added four students statewide. Four. Then the losses resumed: 1,875 in 2022-23, 5,581 in 2023-24, 4,211 in 2024-25, and 8,333 in 2025-26. The post-COVID losses (19,996 students since 2021) now exceed the pandemic-era losses (16,782 students from 2019 to 2021) by 19%.

Only 43 of 136 districts (31.6%) have returned to their 2019 enrollment levels. That rate has declined steadily: in 2020, 51.1% of districts were above their 2019 mark. By 2023, it was 34.8%. By 2026, it fell to 31.6%. Each year, a few more districts slip below their pre-COVID line and do not come back.

The weight falls on a few shoulders

Statewide losses are concentrated to a degree that is unusual even among declining states. Five districts account for 74.4% of the total gap: Albuquerque (-17,667), Las Cruces^↗ (-2,701), Santa Fe^↗ (-2,595), Gadsden^↗ (-2,350), and Gallup^↗ (-2,053). APS alone accounts for 48.0% of the state's entire loss.

APS's trajectory has no inflection point. The district enrolled 90,240 students in 2019, and has declined every year since: 89,543, then 83,556, 82,321, 80,362, 76,870, 75,040, and now 72,573. At its current pace, APS will enroll fewer than 65,000 students within three years of a district that held 92,152 a decade ago. City Desk ABQ reported in 2024 that the enrollment variance in 2023-24 resulted in a $2.5 million reduction in State Equalization Guarantee revenue from the state.

The size gradient is severe. Not a single district enrolling more than 2,000 students in 2019 has recovered to its pre-COVID level. Zero of nine large districts (10,000+). Zero of 20 mid-size districts (2,000-10,000). Recovery is limited to smaller entities: 36.7% of districts between 500 and 2,000 students, and 40.0% of districts under 500.

Where the students went

For most districts, COVID was not the cause. It was the accelerant. The post-pandemic period has been worse than the pandemic itself for 49 of 134 districts (excluding Santa Rosa and Chama Valley, which show counting methodology changes).

The New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee identified the underlying mechanics in a 2021 policy spotlight: the state's birth rate fell 19% between 2010 and 2019, producing 16.4% fewer young children than a decade prior. That translates to roughly 5,900 fewer births per year flowing into the school system. At the same time, the working-age population declined 2% while the over-65 population grew 38%. New Mexico's 2.8% total population growth from 2010 to 2020 was driven almost entirely by aging, not by families.

"Our population is aging, which contributes to lower fertility in the state overall and school enrollment has declined in large part because our child population has declined." -- Jacqueline Miller, UNM Geospatial and Population Studies, KSFR, Sept. 2022

The LFC report found that 43% of families whose students disenrolled during the 2020-21 school year cited moving out of state as the reason. New Mexico took one of the nation's most aggressive approaches to COVID-19 school closures, ordering schools closed on March 16, 2020 and not authorizing full-time in-person return until April 2021, more than a year later. During that period, LFC staff heard "numerous anecdotal accounts of parents moving out of state to enroll their children in neighboring state schools." The LFC estimated only 55% of students who disenrolled during 2021 were likely to return.

The remaining disenrollment breaks down among homeschooling (17.4%), re-enrollment in a private or charter school (14.4%), and students dropped for non-attendance (12.0%), according to the NM Public Education Department survey cited in the LFC report.

The charter divide

Charter schools occupy a separate universe in the recovery data. Among charters, 23 of 43 (53.5%) have recovered to 2019 levels. Among traditional districts, only 18 of 91 (19.8%) have.

The gap goes beyond recovery rates. The traditional sector lost 47,277 students between 2019 and 2026; the charter sector gained 3,172. Explore Academy^↗ grew from 441 to 1,418 students. Mission Achievement and Success^↗ went from 1,167 to 1,898. Hozho Academy^↗ expanded from 123 to 852. These are not districts recovering lost ground. They are schools that grew through the pandemic and kept growing.

Part of the charter recovery advantage reflects size: most charters are small enough to fall into the categories where recovery is more common. But sector identity matters beyond size. Traditional districts under 500 students recovered at 40.0%, while charters of all sizes recovered at 53.5%.

That growth does not offset the traditional losses. Charter enrollment statewide totals 15,753, less than one-fifth of the 47,277 lost by traditional districts. The charter sector is growing, but it is absorbing a fraction of the students leaving, not replacing them. Most of the decline reflects students who left the state's public system entirely.

Espanola^↗ and the rural collapse

The percentage declines in smaller districts are more severe than the headline numbers from Albuquerque. Espanola lost 30.2% of its enrollment since 2019, falling from 3,555 to 2,480. Central^↗ Consolidated dropped 28.4%, from 5,893 to 4,219. Las Vegas City^↗ declined 32.1%, from 1,512 to 1,026. These are districts where losing 500 students means losing an entire elementary school's worth of enrollment and the staffing allocation that comes with it.

Gallup presents a special case. The district actually gained students during the pandemic (from 11,448 in 2019 to 12,418 in 2021), one of the few large districts to do so. But in 2025-26, Gallup dropped to 9,395, a loss of 3,023 from its 2021 level. The 2026 figure represents a restructuring event that warrants further investigation.

Farmington^↗ lost 1,380 students (11.7%), and Rio Rancho^↗ lost 1,318 (7.5%), suggesting that the decline extends beyond the urban core and the poorest rural districts into the state's suburban and mid-size communities.

The bottom is not in sight

New Mexico's public school enrollment has not reached bottom. The state's birth rate, already 19% below its 2010 level, continued to decline after the pandemic. The LFC projected in 2021 that the number of high school graduates would fall 22% by 2037. The 0-to-14 age group is projected to shrink by 10.2% between 2020 and 2040, according to UNM Geospatial and Population Studies projections cited in the LFC report.

The 2025-26 loss of 8,333 students is the second-largest single-year decline in the dataset, behind only the pandemic year of 2020-21. If the state loses students at even half that pace, enrollment will fall below 280,000 within four years, a level not seen since the early 2000s.

The budget hit is direct. At approximately $11,000 per pupil in state funding, the 36,778-student gap since 2019 represents over $400 million in annual revenue that no longer flows to district budgets. APS CFO Renette Apodaca told NM Education that the district is "currently identifying essential areas that require funding and exploring alternative funding sources for key initiatives." Despite enrollment falling by more than 20,000 since 2016, APS approved a budget of almost $2.2 billion for 2024-25, its largest ever. That budget assumed a 2% enrollment decline. The actual decline was 3.3%. Every percentage point of miss costs roughly $2.5 million in state formula funding that has already been spent.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

One in Five NM Students Now in Special Ed

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

New Mexico added 7,779 students to its special education rolls since 2019. In the same period, overall enrollment fell by 36,778. The result: one in five students in the state now receives special education services, a rate that exceeds the national average by more than five percentage points.

The 20.5% special education rate in 2025-26 is not just a milestone. It represents a structural shift in who New Mexico schools are serving and what those schools need to function. The state has crossed a threshold that only a handful of states have reached, and it did so while losing students, closing schools, and struggling to fill nearly 300 special education teaching vacancies.

The numbers behind the threshold

In 2018-19, 53,253 students received special education services, 15.9% of the total. By 2025-26, that count rose to 61,032 while the denominator shrank from 335,131 to 298,353. Both movements pushed the rate upward: more students identified, fewer students enrolled overall.

The increase was not steady. After a pandemic dip in 2020-21 (down 1,593 students, likely reflecting disrupted evaluations), the count recovered and then surged. The largest single-year jump came in 2023-24 (+2,582), followed by another large gain in 2024-25 (+2,138). Across those two years, the special education count rose by 4,720 students (8.5%).

That 2023-24 to 2024-25 surge deserves scrutiny. The newly available 2023-24 subgroup snapshot shows the growth was distributed across two consecutive years, not compressed into a single reporting interval.

A scissor graph: more IEPs, fewer students

Indexed to 2019, total enrollment has fallen to 89% of its starting point. Special education enrollment has risen to 115%. The gap between the two lines widened in every period except 2020-21, when pandemic disruptions temporarily suppressed both identification and enrollment.

This divergence creates a compounding fiscal problem. New Mexico's public education funding formula weights special education students at higher multipliers to reflect the cost of Individualized Education Programs, specialized staffing, and related services. As the share of students entitled to those services grows while the base enrollment generating foundation funding shrinks, districts face a structural mismatch: rising per-pupil service obligations against a declining revenue base.

Where the rate is highest

Fifty-three of the state's 152 districts with special education data now have rates above 20%. That is 34.9% of all districts, up from a far smaller share in 2019. Among the 137 districts with data in both years, 118 (86.1%) saw their special education rate increase. The median increase was 4.1 percentage points.

Albuquerque^↗ stands out. The state's largest district now has a 25.2% special education rate, up from 17.7% in 2019, a 7.5 percentage-point jump. One in four APS students has an IEP. With 18,282 students receiving services, Albuquerque alone accounts for 30.0% of the state's entire special education population. The district's total enrollment has fallen from 90,240 to 72,573 over the same period, but its special education count grew by 2,319.

Rio Rancho^↗ crossed 20% in 2024-25 and now sits at 21.3%, with 3,467 students. Las Cruces^↗, the state's second-largest district, has not yet crossed the threshold but is approaching it at 19.2%, up from 15.1%.

Smaller districts show even more extreme rates. Lovington, at 25.7%, leads among districts with at least 1,000 students. Several small districts and charters exceed 25%, though small denominators make those rates volatile.

Special ed overtakes English learners

For most of the period, special education and English learner enrollment tracked closely. In 2022-23, ELL briefly exceeded special education by 178 students. By 2025-26, the gap reversed: special education now exceeds ELL by 7,883 students. The ELL count actually declined in 2025-26 (from 55,798 to 53,149), while special education continued growing.

These are overlapping populations, not separate ones. Many students receive both ELL and special education services. But the crossover marks a shift in where the state's service demands are concentrating. Special education, with its legal entitlements to individualized instruction, related services, and due-process protections under IDEA, carries a heavier per-student operational burden than most ELL programming.

Identification, not arrival

A 14.6% increase in the special education count while total enrollment falls 11% raises an obvious question: are more students arriving with disabilities, or are more existing students being identified?

The most likely explanation is expanded identification. Nationally, the rate of students receiving IDEA services rose from 14% to 15% between 2019-20 and 2022-23, a one percentage-point increase. New Mexico's 4.6 percentage-point increase over a similar period is far steeper, suggesting state-specific factors beyond the national trend.

Several forces could be driving identification upward. Post-pandemic catch-up evaluations are one: students whose initial evaluations were delayed during 2020-21 school closures and remote learning may have been identified in waves in subsequent years, creating a backlog effect. Improved screening tools and universal screening mandates adopted by some districts may also be catching students who would previously have gone unidentified.

The Yazzie/Martinez consolidated lawsuit, decided in 2018, may also be a factor. The ruling found that New Mexico was failing to provide a sufficient education to at-risk students, English learners, Native American students, and students with disabilities. While the ruling did not directly mandate higher identification rates, the increased scrutiny on services for students with disabilities and the state's subsequent investment in compliance infrastructure may have created institutional incentives to identify students who qualify for protections.

A competing explanation is that New Mexico's poverty rate and health-access limitations contribute to genuinely higher rates of developmental disabilities. The state consistently ranks near the bottom on child well-being measures. But this would not explain the acceleration: those conditions did not change dramatically between 2019 and 2026. The rate of change points toward identification practices more than population characteristics.

A workforce that cannot keep up

The staffing implications are severe. A 2023 study by New Mexico State University's Southwest Outreach Academic Research Evaluation and Policy Center found nearly 300 special education teaching positions vacant statewide. Separately, a Legislative Finance Committee report found approximately 1,300 teachers holding special education licenses were teaching general education courses instead.

"The most inexperienced people being placed in these most challenging positions." — Mary Parr-Sanchez, president, NEA-New Mexico, April 2025

The state attempted to address the shortage with a $5,000 retention stipend program for special education teachers, funded through House Bill 2. But in spring 2025, the Public Education Department pulled funding for the retention phase after the recruitment phase consumed most available resources. More than 700 teachers had been submitted for recruitment stipends before Albuquerque Public Schools had even submitted its list. The retention stipends never materialized.

The Legislative Finance Committee had proposed a $60 million allocation over four years for special education teacher pay differentials. The governor recommended $16 million as a one-time allocation. Neither figure was designed for a state where one in five students carries an IEP.

Charter schools carry less of the load

Traditional public schools serve special education students at a 20.6% rate. Charter schools serve them at 18.1%. That gap has narrowed from 2.1 percentage points in 2019 to 2.5 in 2026, but it still means traditional districts are absorbing a disproportionate share of the state's special education obligations relative to their enrollment.

This is a common pattern nationally. Charter schools often lack the specialized staffing, related-service providers, and facility infrastructure for high-needs IEPs, which can effectively steer families of students with significant disabilities toward traditional schools. The result compounds the fiscal pressure on traditional districts: they lose students (and the per-pupil funding attached to them) to charters while retaining a higher-cost student body.

No plateau in sight

The 20% threshold is not a policy trigger in New Mexico's funding formula. There is no automatic adjustment that kicks in when a fifth of a district's students have IEPs. But the rate is now high enough that it reshapes budget assumptions. Districts budgeting for 15% or 16% special education rates, as most were doing five years ago, are operating on outdated math.

National trends suggest the rate will keep climbing: improved awareness, expanded eligibility categories, and post-pandemic screening backlogs are all still in motion. If New Mexico's trajectory holds, the state could approach 22% to 23% within two to three years, joining Pennsylvania, New York, and Maine in territory where more than one in five students carries an IEP.

Meanwhile, nearly 300 special education teaching positions sit vacant statewide. The retention stipends never materialized. And the 61,032 students with IEPs are entitled, by federal law, to individualized services regardless of whether anyone shows up to provide them.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Native American Students Fall Below 10% of NM Enrollment

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMT

New Mexico is one of three states where Native American children make up at least 10% of public school enrollment. Or it was. In 2025-26, Native American students slipped to 9.9% of enrollment, the first time their share has fallen below that threshold in available state data. The milestone arrived not through a single catastrophic year but through a six-year erosion that accelerated sharply when a contract dispute in the state's largest Navajo-serving district displaced thousands of students.

The 29,401 Native American students enrolled in 2025-26 represent a loss of 5,602 from the 2019-20 peak of 35,003, a 16.0% decline. That rate of loss is half again as steep as the state's overall 10.3% enrollment drop over the same period. In a state whose education system is under court order to improve outcomes for Native students, the shrinking count raises a paradox: the population most directly covered by the Yazzie/Martinez ruling is getting smaller even as the mandate to serve them grows.

A Steady Slide, Then a Cliff

The decline did not begin suddenly. Native American enrollment peaked at 35,003 in 2019-20, ticked down modestly through 2022-23 (to 33,790, a loss of 1,213 over three years), then fell by 3,188 in a single two-year span from 2022-23 to 2024-25. The 2025-26 count of 29,401 represents another 1,201 lost in one year.

The share trajectory tells a related but distinct story. During the COVID years of 2020-21 and 2021-22, Native American students actually gained share (rising to 10.75%) even as their absolute count declined. Total enrollment was falling faster. That cushion evaporated by 2024-25, when the share dipped to 9.98%, and it fell further to 9.85% in 2025-26.

The gap between Native American enrollment losses and statewide losses is substantial. Since 2019-20, the state lost 34,319 students total. Native American students account for 5,602 of that loss, or 16.3%, despite representing only about 10% of the student body. Every other major racial group also declined in absolute terms (white enrollment fell 25.9%, Hispanic fell 6.8%), but Native American students are declining faster than the overall rate while already being a far smaller group.

The Gallup Rupture

No district explains this story more than Gallup-McKinley County Schools^↗. In 2025-26, Gallup lost 3,342 students in a single year, dropping from 12,737 to 9,395, a 26.2% decline. Of the 1,201 Native American students lost statewide between 2024-25 and 2025-26, Gallup accounted for 673, or 56%.

The cause is specific and documented. In May 2025, the Gallup school board voted to terminate its contract with Stride Inc. (formerly K12), a virtual education provider that had enrolled roughly 4,000 students statewide through the district. The termination, effective June 30, 2025, followed allegations of academic and legal violations, including graduation rates that plunged from 55.8% in 2022 to 27.7% in 2024 and math proficiency scores of just 5.6% for Stride students.

The displacement was swift. Many families continued with Stride through new contracts that Santa Rosa and Chama Valley school districts signed in July 2025, which explains why those two small districts show sudden gains in Native American enrollment (Santa Rosa went from zero to 164 Native American students; Chama Valley from 21 to 160). Gallup's loss was partly redistributed, not purely lost to the system.

"It was our students that were taken advantage of... that just makes me sick inside that a company did this on our watch." — Superintendent Mike Hyatt, NBC News, February 2026

But the Stride saga is layered over a deeper problem. Even before the contract termination, Gallup's Native American enrollment was falling: from 9,067 in 2019-20 to 8,027 in 2024-25, a loss of 1,040 that had nothing to do with virtual school reshuffling. The district, which has the highest rate of Navajo enrollment in the country with half its 32 schools on tribal land, has faced persistent criticism over equity. A Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission report found that schools on the reservation received fewer resources than those off tribal land, with some students lacking basic utilities.

"Historically, education's been a tool to civilize, to assimilate, to acculturate Navajo people." — Commission Chair Wendy Greyeyes, Searchlight New Mexico

Beyond Gallup: A Geography of Loss

Strip Gallup from the data and the statewide decline still amounts to 3,889 students since the 2019-20 peak, a 15.0% loss. The pattern is broad. Of 70 districts that enrolled Native American students in both 2019-20 and 2025-26, 36 lost students and 33 gained them, but the losers are far larger. The top five districts by Native American enrollment (Gallup, Albuquerque^↗, Farmington^↗, Central Consolidated, and Grants^↗) hold 69% of all Native American students statewide. The top 10 hold 83%.

Central Consolidated^↗, headquartered in Shiprock on the Navajo Nation, has lost 1,422 Native American students since 2019-20 (a 28.0% decline) and its total enrollment has fallen from 5,653 to 4,219. Zuni Public Schools^↗, where 96% of students are Native American, dropped from 1,299 to 975, a 24.9% loss. Albuquerque, the state's largest district, lost 1,201 Native American students (23.6%), reflecting both the statewide trend and urban migration patterns.

Even districts farther from reservation communities show losses. Rio Rancho^↗ lost 31.2% of its Native American students. Los Lunas^↗ lost 32.0%. These are smaller absolute numbers (283 and 173, respectively) but steep proportional declines that suggest the trend extends beyond reservation-adjacent districts.

What Shrinking Enrollment Does Not Tell You

The enrollment data cannot distinguish between families who left public schools and families whose children aged out or were never born. Nationally, the American Indian and Alaska Native child population declined by nearly 134,000 between 2000 and 2023, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, with the largest losses among children under age five. New Mexico, where Native American children represent roughly 10% of the child population, is one of three states with the highest such concentration, alongside Alaska and South Dakota.

A shrinking base population means some enrollment decline is demographic gravity, not a policy failure or a sign of dissatisfaction. But the rate matters. Native American enrollment in New Mexico fell 16.0% from 2019-20 to 2025-26, while overall enrollment fell 10.3%. If the decline were purely demographic, both rates would track more closely. The gap suggests additional factors at work: families choosing alternatives to public school, pandemic-era disengagement that never reversed, or structural issues in the districts that serve the largest Native populations.

The multiracial reclassification that New Mexico introduced in 2022 complicates the picture further. The state went from reporting zero multiracial students to 7,221 in 2024-25. Some portion of students previously counted as Native American may now be classified as multiracial, making the apparent decline partly a measurement artifact. The magnitude is unknowable from enrollment data alone.

Fewer students, bigger mandate

New Mexico's public education system operates under a 2018 court ruling in the consolidated Yazzie/Martinez case, which found the state in violation of its constitution for failing to adequately educate Native American students, English learners, students with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged students. In April 2025, a judge found the state still out of compliance and ordered a new action plan.

The plan the Public Education Department produced drew objections from nearly all 23 tribes in the state. The All Pueblo Council of Governors wrote that the agency had not consulted them. As of February 2026, plaintiffs and tribal leaders were asking the judge to reject the plan entirely.

The enrollment decline sharpens this tension. The Yazzie mandate requires the state to invest specifically in programs for Native students: culturally relevant curricula, Native language instruction, community-based support. Those programs depend on enrollment-driven funding. As the number of Native American students shrinks, the per-student cost of maintaining specialized services rises, creating pressure to consolidate programs precisely when the court says they should expand. Dulce Independent Schools^↗, which serves the Jicarilla Apache Nation and lost 104 Native American students (19.3%) since 2019-20, enrolls just 434 Native American students in a remote community with no nearby alternatives.

What to Watch

The Gallup situation remains unresolved. In March 2026, the district announced it had settled with Stride and reinstated a modified contract through June 2026. Whether the thousands of students who transferred to Santa Rosa and Chama Valley return to Gallup in 2026-27 will determine whether this year's 3,342-student loss was a one-time redistribution or a permanent fracture in how virtual education is delivered across the Navajo Nation.

The deeper question is structural. Six majority-Native American districts (Gallup, Central, Zuni, Cuba^↗, Dulce, and Jemez Valley^↗) enrolled 13,077 Native American students in 2025-26. That number was 16,929 in 2018-19. These districts serve communities where the school is often the largest employer and the primary institution connecting children to their language and culture. Losing nearly a quarter of their enrollment in seven years does not just change a budget line. It changes what a school can be.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Rio Rancho - EdTribune NM - New Mexico Education Data

Explore Academy Grew 612% in a Decade. Then 2026 Happened.

A flagship that keeps climbing

The network's uneven geography

The 2026 reversal in context

Where Explore fits in the charter landscape

A demographic profile unlike the state

What 2027 will test

One in Six New Mexico Students Is an English Learner

The divergence in numbers

Where the growth is coming from

The funding equation

Where concentration is highest

The 2026 reversal

A system built for decline, serving growth

Fewer Than One in Five

A 3.9-point slide in seven years

The 55% problem

Where the losses concentrate

The charter gap

What is driving this

The 20 holdouts

Below 15% by 2035

Six Years After COVID, 93 Districts Still Haven't Recovered

The gap that kept growing

The weight falls on a few shoulders

Where the students went

The charter divide

Espanola↗ and the rural collapse

The bottom is not in sight

One in Five NM Students Now in Special Ed

The numbers behind the threshold

A scissor graph: more IEPs, fewer students

Where the rate is highest

Special ed overtakes English learners

Identification, not arrival

A workforce that cannot keep up

Charter schools carry less of the load

No plateau in sight

Native American Students Fall Below 10% of NM Enrollment

A Steady Slide, Then a Cliff

The Gallup Rupture

Beyond Gallup: A Geography of Loss

What Shrinking Enrollment Does Not Tell You

Fewer students, bigger mandate

What to Watch

Espanola^↗ and the rural collapse