We hope you all are staying safe and keeping active! There’s a lot of reason now to be hopeful about returning to normal, but there’s still work to be done!

At today’s meeting, we learned more about the upcoming return to in-person schooling in the Gadsden school district. With the coming changes, it is important to note that parents will have a choice whether they’d like their children to attend school in-person or online. We should learn more from the school board meeting on Thursday (2/4), but here’s what we know so far. In the coming week (2/8), half of the teachers should be going back to school twice a week with Wednesdays set aside for sanitization. The following week (2/15), instructional and office assistants will be returning, and the rest of the staff will be returning the week after (2/22). We also heard from the school bus supervisor in Anthony, NM, who assured us that the school board is making careful considerations and good plans for how to return to in-person instruction. There have been many concerns about student engagement during online schooling, so we’re hopeful that coming back will reinvigorate our youth! As with all major changes, it’s important that we keep each other in our thoughts - everyone’s been challenged by this pandemic, so patience and empathy will be key in making sure that our children are able to go back to school with as little stress as possible!

We also heard from community members about registering for the vaccine. The Department of Health has set up vaccinenm.org to coordinate a rollout of the vaccine, but there are concerns that this site is not user-friendly for older New Mexicans who are of the highest priority for vaccination. We need better accessibility for these systems. There is also concern that we aren’t getting as many vaccines as were promised; we at Health Action NM are keeping an eye on this. You can keep up to date with what we’re hearing by checking out the news page.

At our next meeting, we’ll be further discussing a return to in-person schooling and vaccine rollout, as well as other ways that we can help make sure that Southern and rural New Mexico are at the table during this and future legislative sessions.