Johnny F. Luévano Jr.
The policy recommendations I put forth in my first segment on education are not fancy or politically sexy. The details of policy can be downright boring. But details are important, and I am confident these small policy changes can greatly benefit many current and future college students.
In addition to making the Lottery Scholarship more flexible, I suggest that we must get more creative with the use of this scholarship in order to provide more support to our educators. This increased support must come in the form of what I call getting more muscle in the classroom, while simultaneously limiting increases in the state’s education budget.
How do we increase support for educators without increasing taxes or substantially increasing the state budget? Well this is going to require that we think out of the box and take ideas from all folks, while relying heavily upon our classroom educators who are our resident experts.
My idea is to require lottery recipients to earn the scholarship through some form of volunteer work in support of our educators and staff members. The volunteer work can be very minimal — 2-3 hours per week — but consistent, with one-on-one relationships between the volunteer student and the supported educator or staff member. Basically I am suggesting a form of teacher-assistant positions that can perform various non-instructional duties with very limited contact with the actual students.
The volunteers can be tasked with something as simple as grading exams or organizing special tasks for an entire semester or quarter. If this idea sounds bizarre, I challenge you to find a classroom teacher and ask him or her how much value these simple tasks could bring to his or her classroom instruction time. Of course the volunteer tasks would be unlimited and at the discretion of the individual educator or staff member.
My argument is that we must begin to treat our educators as professionals, valuing their trained abilities to teach our children and freeing them up to focus strictly on curriculum. The pool of lottery recipients is an ideal source of volunteers who could contribute back to our educational system in exchange for earning fully paid college tuition.
I propose that this begin with a very limited pilot program at one or two volunteer schools, with true volunteer students who wish to participate in this initial program. If successful, there are endless ideas on how to utilize these new volunteers that could include encouraging more parents to get involved in the classroom in exchange for earning future college tuition for their children.
The basic idea is that for each volunteered semester or quarter a student or parent can earn one fully paid college semester within the state of New Mexico for up to eight total semesters. This could include parents volunteering at a very early stage of a child’s education to earn up to four fully paid college tuitions that their child can utilize upon graduating from high school.
Heck, I even suggest we open it up for students to earn fully paid post-graduate tuition as well.
The opportunities and ideas are endless, but the point is that we must begin experimenting with non-traditional policies if we are to begin improving the overall education success rate within the state of New Mexico.
Luévano, a registered independent, is a Marine Corps officer with 18 years of active-duty service and an Artesia native. He graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2001 with a bachelor’s in political science and economics and from the University of Kansas in 2008 with a master’s in public administration. The views expressed are those of the individual only and not those of the Department of Defense. You can reach him at jfluevano@gmail.com.
Luévano bio │ Archives │ Feed