New Mexico school closures, online learning may have set students back by months

LAS CRUCES, New Mexico -- After New Mexico's governor ordered the closure of schools to prevent the spread of Covid-19, less than half of the state's students regularly participated in online learning, according to a new report by the state's Legislative Finance Committee.

"School closures will exacerbate learning loss over the summer,
leaving students three months to a year behind," reads the report.

"For them to say the learning loss was going to be from three months to an entire year, we don't know that," said Superintendent Dr. Karen Trujillo.

She described the report as "troubling" and she "had some questions about their data points."

"I didn't sign up to be a teacher to teach on a screen," said Angela Silguero, a first grade teacher at Macarthur Elementary in Las Cruces. "I love that I change lives. I feel like I'm not changing lives on a computer screen."

The largest barriers to learning included working parents who could not help their children and a lack of access to technology, according to the report.

"At-risk children will likely start the upcoming school year farther behind than their more affluent peers," reads the report.

Before the pandemic, around 1 in 5 children in Las Cruces Public Schools did not have access to the technology they needed to learn, district officials told ABC-7 back in April.

"The number at first sounded extraordinary," a district spokeswoman told ABC-7 at the time. "But every school pooled together their resources and determined that they were able to meet that need."

The district mobilized to help an estimated 4,500 students without access to a laptop or tablet at home and 1,700 did not have access to the internet. The district has nearly 25,000 students.

Silguero told ABC-7 that she had a parent call her, asking where to find the computer's "on" button.

"It's not just the kids that don't know how to use technology," Silguero said. "It's the parents, too. How are you expecting the kids to know if the parents don't either?"

The New Mexico Public Education Department has not yet detailed what the fall semester will look like or whether the state will implement remote learning, in-person instruction or a hybrid of the two.

"I would really want to see a classroom environment," said Silguero, adding that the state should require safety measures like sanitization. "Seeing someone on a screen and saying hi is completely difficult from interacting with them, learning how to share."