I ran for re-election to the Las Cruces Public Schools Board of Education to continue serving and meeting the needs of our young people. What I witness is that our board, district leaders, educators, employees, partners, and families want to support students toward success. We all know that it will take collaboration among us to rethink and reimagine our systems for youth to thrive and for healthier, more prosperous communities. Thankfully, the New Mexico Legislature created the Innovation Zone initiative, which is providing $200,000 to support high school transformation in our district.

Innovation Zone is wide ranging in its focus. It includes Career and Technical Education, Capstone Projects, and Work Based Learning. I appreciate that districts are able to choose the focus area that holds the most promise for their students. Specifically, we can focus our attention on the students who need the innovation the most as a starting place for our transformation. Focusing on our young people who are off track to graduation is critical because many of them lead complicated lives that ask them to work, care for their younger siblings, and deal with the social and emotional pressures of being an adolescent in the modern world.

Many of these students have irregular attendance and are missing credits, and they need our attention, care, and concern. LCPS has responded with a program that gives young people a chance to earn multiple credits through a community-based capstone project. It’s an ingenious approach by our district leaders that recognizes the best learning happens by doing. It also embraces the fact that the real world is interdisciplinary and doesn’t isolate learning into subject areas like Math, Language Arts, History, etc.

Remedies to the Martinez Yazzie lawsuit need innovation like this as the path forward. Connecting young people to their community through capstone projects creates opportunities that embrace the language, culture, and values of our young people and their families. I feel we are on the right track by being to implement this strategy with partners like Success Partnership. It is a testament to the faith our community has in our students and our schools.

This initiative is a big deal! Our young people are capable, we just need to give them a chance to prove it by redesigning our schools to adapt to their expressed needs, rather than the other way around – an important reframing of our work. LCPS is 1 of 47 districts and charters through the Innovation Zone initiative from a field of more than 80 applicants. This gap shows that educators across New Mexico want to do the best they can for their young people and there is clearly not enough money to go around. Our story is unique to us, but all of the Innovation Zone members are pursuing what they believe will serve their students and communities best, and that’s the beauty of this initiative. While recipients are excited that the Legislature, Secretary of Education, and Governor have embraced the Innovation Zone initiative, more funding is needed for bottom-up, community-based strategies such as this. I hope that the initiative will receive increased funding to scale this work locally and to support other innovative initiatives across the state when the Legislature meets in January 2024.

This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Let’s invest in student success and fund innovative strategies