Gallup McKinley superintendent says online vendor failure, funding rules hurt student outcomes and programs

Gallup McKinley County Schools Superintendent Mike Hyatt told the Legislative Education Study Committee in Gallup that the district made a deliberate vendor change after discovering major shortcomings in its previous online-provider contract, a switch that reduced the district’s online enrollment from several thousand students to about 600 this school year.

Hyatt said the district uncovered the problem “late winter, early spring” and found the prior vendor had breached contract terms by failing to hire sufficient teachers and by not administering appropriate assessments. “They were purposefully, in our opinion, not hiring the teachers … to have higher profit margins,” Hyatt said. The district retained roughly 400 returning students and added about 200 more after switching providers.

Why it matters: LESC members pressed the district because, officials said, those online cohorts produced much poorer academic outcomes that lowered overall graduation cohort figures when combined with in-person students. Hyatt and staff told the committee the district’s decoded analysis found a graduation rate near 27% for the online cohort that materially lowered aggregated rates; after accounting for online results, overall district graduation rates dropped several percentage points.

The district framed the vendor change as a move to regain instructional control. Hyatt said the new contract gives the district more leverage to require training, assessment alignment and better student-teacher ratios.

What the district presented: Deputy Superintendent Giovanna Hanks and curriculum directors described a suite of data systems and instructional supports they say staff use to track student progress. Hanks demonstrated a student performance tracker, course-completion tracker and a family-engagement tracker intended to identify credit deficits and align interventions at the teacher, school and district levels. Assistant director Kristen Bischoff described K–12 pacing guides, weekly formative checks and the district’s work on structured literacy, noting adoption of LETRS, Amira/Istation and the Logic of English phonics program for early grades.

Programs and partnerships: The district also highlighted career-pathway work and an early-college McKinley Academy that serves 611 students — described as roughly 19% of the district’s high-school population — and partnerships that include Navajo Technical University and UNM Gallup. Hyatt said paid student internships run at $12 an hour.

Funding constraints and reporting friction: Hanks told the committee that funding for many initiatives comes from a mixture of operational, federal (notably Carl Perkins and ARP in some years) and below-the-line sources that carry varying timelines and reporting burdens. She said a state pot of programs discussed in session — framed in presentation materials as a roughly $59 million statewide package for mentorships, literacy, career technical programs and community-school frameworks — yielded about $24.4 million to the district for those targeted initiatives, but that the district must often cobble together operational and federal funds to sustain staff and program costs.

Hanks and board staff urged legislators to require more granular accounting than the existing chart-of-accounts codes (for example, the broad 4020 code) because the current categories obscure how districts allocate funds. Hanks said the lack of granularity reduces transparency for lawmakers and complicates district planning.

Public questions and district responses: Committee members asked about the scale of the online enrollment drop. Hyatt said the previous year the vendor served thousands across the state and the district, but after data analysis and contract breaches the district retained roughly 600 online students. The panel said the vendor had under-hired teachers (the district estimated the vendor should have had roughly 200 teachers on contract for that prior student load) and had not delivered the required assessments or supports.

The superintendent also described operational challenges that affect program delivery: long bus routes in a sparsely populated service area, connectivity gaps for about 10% of students with limited cell service, and delays in receiving capital and safety allocations from state agencies. On the Indian Education Act and Yazzie Martinez-related funding questions, Hyatt said the district often must use other funds to meet heritage-language program obligations because state support has been inconsistent.

What comes next: The district said it is working to secure better vendor accountability, to continue structured-literacy certification (aiming to certify all K–5 teachers in LETRS by the end of the year) and to provide LESC with more granular fiscal reporting when possible. Hyatt invited legislative support to improve data-sharing with higher-education partners and to revisit funding rules that constrain local decision-making.

Ending: The committee moved from the GMCS panel to a broader superintendent panel that discussed lessons from LETRS, math instruction, teacher preparation time and attendance strategies across districts.