GMCS tackling state concerns on discipline, suspensions
By Molly Ann Howell
Managing Editor
Attorney General Raúl Torrez released the New Mexico Department of Justice’s (NMDOJ) investigative report into student discipline practices at Gallup-McKinley County Schools (GMCS) on July 2. The report found that the district relies on out-of-school suspensions at some of the highest rates in the state and that administrators discipline Native American and Hispanic students more frequently and severely than their white peers.
The NMDOJ opened its investigation following community concerns and public reporting regarding GMCS’s discipline practices. To compile the report, investigators analyzed public discipline data from 2015 to 2025, reviewed district policies, examined formal complaints, and gathered testimony from educators, families, and community stakeholders.
DISTRICT LEADERSHIP PROMISES REFORM
In a July 6 press release, newly appointed GMCS Superintendent Jvanna Hanks II acknowledged that the state’s report raises critical concerns regarding exclusionary discipline, lost instructional time, and demographic disparities.
“This is a moment of transition and renewed focus for GMCS,” Hanks stated. “As the new superintendent, I am committed to strengthening trust with families, improving consistency across schools, and ensuring that discipline practices support student learning, safety, and belonging.”
During a July 23 school board meeting, Hanks and Assistant Superintendent Carrie Lovato detailed the immediate steps GMCS is taking to address the state’s findings. Lovato emphasized that the administration is taking the findings seriously.
“This report reflects real experiences of real students in our schools,” she said. “So this is extremely important to us that this report gets the time and the respect it deserves so that we can fill gaps and we can move forward in a manner that provides more equity for all GMCS students.”
As a first step, the district plans to overhaul its student handbook by benchmarking it against similarly sized districts across New Mexico and nationwide. GMCS will also establish focus groups—composed of principals, teachers, students, and community members—to review proposed revisions before any official changes are adopted.
“We don’t want to give a knee-jerk reaction [to this report] and just start making a bunch of changes until we really have gathered the input, we’ve done the comparisons, and then looked at the data to see what gaps are identified,” Lovato said.
The district is also evaluating its current alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as McKinley County’s Teen Court initiative and the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports framework—to assess their effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.
The NMDOJ report acknowledged that GMCS has made “encouraging progress” in recent years, including notable reductions in expulsions and law enforcement referrals. Lovato explained that many of these operational shifts began in 2022, when district leadership first became aware of the state’s impending inquiry.
In a 2023 article by the Sun, former Superintendent Mike Hyatt argued that historical scrutiny over the district’s suspension rates stemmed partly from inaccurate data entry.
Prior to 2022, individual school principals recorded disciplinary actions locally before sending them to a central secretary for entry into the state’s Student Teacher Accountability Reporting System. Due to inconsistent definitions of “expulsion” vs. “long-term suspension,” many lower-level disciplinary actions were miscategorized as expulsions, artificially inflating the figures submitted to the New Mexico Public Education Department.
Today, a dedicated STARS compliance team manually enters and verifies all discipline data to ensure accuracy.
Additionally, Hanks announced several new oversight protocols:
Direct Executive Review: Hanks will personally review all long-term suspension requests before they are finalized.
Monthly Board Reporting: District leadership will present monthly discipline statistics to the school board to maintain transparency.
Alternative Learning Placement: Implemented in 2022, this system allows students facing severe infractions to complete coursework through virtual learning rather than serving out-of-school expulsions.
Hanks and Lovato said this alternative placement system prevents total loss of instructional time and resulted in zero traditional expulsions for two consecutive academic years (2023–2024 and 2024–2025), with only a single expulsion recorded during the 2025–2026 school year for a severe infraction.
GMCS also plans to extract discipline data from its student information system to analyze infractions by school site, behavior type, gender, ethnicity, and associated behavioral health supports.
BY THE NUMBERS
While acknowledging the need for ongoing improvement, GMCS officials maintain that the NMDOJ’s overarching conclusions regarding racial disparities are skewed by broader statistical factors.
In a July 10 interview with the Sun, School Board President Kevin Mitchell pointed out that several rural GMCS schools serve near-homogenous Native American student populations, making demographic comparisons across the entire district misleading without proper context.
Mitchell also argued that the state’s reporting system fails to isolate repeat offenders. Because PED counts each instance of suspension as an independent data point rather than tracking individual students, a small number of students facing chronic behavioral challenges can significantly inflate overall percentage metrics for an entire demographic group.
Furthermore, during her July 23 presentation, Lovato noted that the NMDOJ included virtual learning students in the total baseline enrollment numbers used to calculate discipline rates. Because virtual students face virtually no risk for classroom infractions like physical altercations or property vandalism, including them in the baseline distorts the comparative data.
Because GMCS partners with a standalone virtual provider (Stride) to allow remote students to remain enrolled at their local “home schools” for athletics and extracurriculars rather than having their own virtual program, the state DOJ counted the students in the district’s overall discipline denominator.
Demographically, however, virtual and in-person enrollment at GMCS look vastly different:
Native American Students: 93.7% attend school in-person, while only 6.3% are enrolled in virtual learning.
White Students: 74.6% are enrolled in virtual learning, with 25.4% attending in-person.
Hispanic Students: 67.9% attend virtually, while 32.1% attend in-person.
Because the vast majority of white students in the district learn remotely, their exposure to traditional in-school discipline policies is inherently minimal, skewing the comparative rates when evaluated against the predominantly in-person Native American student body.
District leaders acknowledge that despite data entry issues and statistical nuances, structural improvements are still necessary.
“We’re grateful for the NMDOJ and the time and effort they took to compile this data,” Lovato said in her closing remarks. “GMCS recognizes the importance of this report and the responsibility it places on us.”
The Attorney General’s full investigative report is available on the NMDOJ website.
For further information about the timeline that led to this investigation, visit the Sun’s website at gallupsunweekly.com.
