No blame assigned for public education's $20M shortfall

April 05, 2011

KOB Eyewitness News 4 wanted to get some straight answers about what caused school districts across New Mexico to cut even more money from their budgets. State school officials say the problem isn't as simple as two plus two, but somehow there was a breakdown in communication where things didn't add up—and now the state's education is short roughly $20 million, according to some estimates. Tom Sullivan is the executive director for the New Mexico Coalition of School Administrators and he believes there were enough red flags in the financial data. "There should have been some warning signs and we think that perhaps legislators would have looked at the budget a little bit differently had they known that schools were going to take bigger hit than schools anticipated," said Sullivan. KOB went to Santa Fe to get answers from the Public Education Department and asked them if they saw those red flags to warn legislators.