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This article was produced by New Mexico In Depth, which has twice been a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
A New Mexico school district that was disproportionately issuing harsh punishments to Indigenous students says it has dramatically reduced its long-term suspensions.
Two years ago, New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica reported that Indigenous children in New Mexico were facing higher rates of harsh school punishment, triggering a state Department of Justice civil rights inquiry into the discipline practices of the school district largely responsible for the disparity.
According to a January email from Gallup-McKinley County Schools Superintendent Mike Hyatt, the number of students kicked out of the district for 90 days or longer dropped from 21 children during the 2021-22 school year to six the following year and just one last year. Of those 28 long-term removals, 86%, or 24 cases, involved Native students.
But the state refused to provide New Mexico In Depth with complete, unredacted discipline data for the years in question, citing federal public records law governing educational records, making it impossible to independently verify those claims.
The district now appears to be more judicious in imposing long-term removals, reserving them for serious, potentially dangerous infractions.
As an example: From 2016-17 to 2019-20, before the changes, Gallup-McKinley reported that long-term removals were being used as punishment for disruptive behavior (“disorderly conduct”). But in all the cases Hyatt listed for 2021-22 to 2023-24, long-term removals were used only for more serious infractions, including repeated drug possession, drug distribution, assault, armed battery, theft and weapons possession, including firearms cases, he wrote.
In addition to the data, Hyatt said the district has made policy changes to better engage with students and prevent behavioral problems. It has replaced the district administrator in charge of student discipline, who has since retired, he said.
In 2022, the news organizations undertook a detailed analysis of statewide school discipline rates that showed Indigenous students disproportionately experience the harshest forms of punishment: exclusions from school for 90 days or more and referrals to law enforcement.
Using district discipline reports obtained from the state Public Education Department, the news organizations found that Gallup-McKinley, which boasts the largest Native student body in the nation, was the epicenter of a statewide trend toward Indigenous children being pushed out of classrooms at higher rates than other students between 2016 and 2020. At the time, the district’s superintendent called the findings “completely false,” but the district’s own data contradicted that claim.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who heads the state’s Department of Justice and its new Civil Rights Division, initiated a review of the matter in late 2023. His investigators were also unable to obtain complete, unredacted data from the education department, according to emails between the agencies that New Mexico In Depth reviewed.
The state’s Department of Justice inquiry also faced delays as it tried to obtain student discipline data from Gallup-McKinley, emails show. In two, from Aug. 21, 2024, and Oct. 17, 2024, investigators took the school district to task for violating a statutory deadline in responding to their Inspection of Public Records Act requests.
Other emails in 2023 and 2024 reflected investigators’ frustration over repeated efforts to get meetings with state education officials who could provide more detailed data and answer questions.
In early June 2024, state Department of Justice Special Counsel Sean Sullivan urgently requested an in-person meeting with education department officials to discuss student discipline data. The meeting occurred June 20. But by July 1, Sullivan noted investigators still needed more detailed data. And in August, Sullivan repeatedly sought answers about missing data from the education department’s data manager.
State Department of Justice spokesperson Lauren Rodriguez told New Mexico In Depth in late January that the agency’s civil rights investigation is ongoing. Hyatt said he believed his office had fulfilled the department’s requests.
In a January email exchange with a reporter, Hyatt pushed back on New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica’s reporting, asserting discipline practices at Gallup-McKinley were not as harsh as the district’s past reports to the state suggested.
He said that after news headlines in 2022, an internal review identified extensive data entry errors in the district’s quarterly student discipline reports to the state. Specifically, he said punishments reported to the state as expulsions should instead have been logged as suspensions. (The district also changed its definition of expulsion in a way that would reduce the count of the harshest penalty: At the time of the newsrooms’ analyses, the district defined expulsions as removals of 90 days or longer; expulsion is now defined as permanent removals.)
But New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica found that student removals from school for 90 days or longer — regardless of what those removals are called — remained far higher for Gallup-McKinley than the rest of the state.
After meeting with Torrez about the state Department of Justice’s inquiry in September 2023, Hyatt contracted with a Kentucky-based financial consulting contractor, Unbridled Advisory. The contractor’s report showed that Native students’ discipline rates were modestly higher than other students, but not high enough in their view to be significant.
However, the company’s assessment did not include expulsions and did not conduct a specific analysis of the harshest forms of punishment, like the one carried out by the news organizations.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WPLN/Nashville Public Radio. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Two Republican state lawmakers in Tennessee have filed legislation that aims to protect domestic violence victims by requiring more transparency from people who’ve been ordered by a court to give up their guns.
The bill’s introduction follows WPLN and ProPublica reporting that found the state’s lax gun laws and enforcement allow firearms to remain in the hands of abusers who’ve been barred from keeping them, including some who have gone on to kill their victims. In Tennessee, when someone is convicted of a domestic violence charge or is subject to an order of protection, they are not allowed to possess a gun.
Tennessee is one of about a dozen states that allows someone who is ordered to surrender their guns to give them to a third party, such as a friend or relative. And it’s one of the only states that doesn’t require that person to be identified in court, leaving the legal system no way to check up on them. Someone could say they gave up their guns but still have access to them, advocates for domestic violence victims say.
WPLN and ProPublica’s most recent reporting on guns highlighted the work of rural Scott County, which has revolutionized its approach to reducing domestic violence, in part by requiring gun-dispossession forms to include the names of the people who are receiving the firearms.
State Rep. Kelly Keisling, a Republican who represents Scott County, and state Sen. Becky Massey, R-Knoxville, now want to take that change statewide. Massey pointed to WPLN and ProPublica’s reporting on Scott County as inspiration for the bill. But she said it’s unclear what its chances are with the state’s Republican supermajority.
“The kiss of death to a bill is to say it would be easy,” Massey said. “Time will tell. You don’t know whether you can accomplish something unless you try. But I mean, it’s not changing the law. They are supposed to dispossess. So it’s just a matter of what the form is like.”
While amending the public form is a simple step, it could have a massive payoff, said Christy Harness, who has worked in domestic violence in Scott County for decades and manages the county’s family justice center, which helps victims.
“You are kidding me!” a jubilant Harness said when she heard the news about the bill. “My gosh. How awesome for victims across the state.”
Tennessee consistently has one of the highest rates of women killed by men, and most of those homicides are committed with guns. WPLN and ProPublica’s analysis of homicide data and court records in Nashville showed that from 2007 to 2024, nearly 40% of those who died in domestic violence shootings were killed by someone who should not have had access to a firearm at the time of the crime.
“Had they not been able to maintain possession of that firearm or it was given to somebody who we could check with, then maybe we’ve done that extra step to save somebody’s life,” Harness said.
Research has shown that domestic violence incidents are highly likely to become lethal when a firearm is involved. And the dangers extend outside the home, too — one study showed domestic violence calls are among the most dangerous for law enforcement to respond to, and researchers found that mass shooters often have a history of domestic violence.
Requiring the name and address of third-party holders in gun-dispossession cases “really is an added protection for the peace of mind of victims,” said Judge Scarlett Ellis, who oversees Scott County’s domestic violence court. “There’s a little bit more accountability.”
Ellis said she has not had anyone refuse to fill out, sign or return the amended form — even in a rural, conservative, Second Amendment-friendly county like hers. Scott has voted for Donald Trump by the highest percentage of any county in Tennessee for the past two presidential elections.
“This is just a clear example of when a community gets behind enforcing the law, it doesn't matter how big you are, how small you are — changes can be made,” Ellis said.
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A multiyear defamation lawsuit sparked by a ProPublica article officially ended on Jan. 24, marking a final victory in the case for its author, freelance journalist William D. Cohan. A New York state appeals court had ruled in his favor in 2023, and the state’s highest court left that ruling in place in September 2024, declining to hear an appeal. The plaintiff ultimately agreed to pay Cohan certain defense costs and did not pursue a long-shot appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. With that, the parties concluded the case.
The suit stemmed from a July 2020 article written by Cohan titled “The Bizarre Fall of the CEO of Coach and Kate Spade’s Parent Company.” Jide Zeitlin, the subject of the article, sued Cohan in 2021, claiming that he was defamed by the story. The article chronicled Zeitlin’s “improbable” rise from modest circumstances as the son of a Nigerian maid to becoming a Goldman Sachs partner and Fortune 500 CEO. It also examined his downfall, as allegations of an extramarital affair with a woman he photographed helped lead to his resignation from Tapestry, the corporation that owns Coach and other prominent brands.
As ProPublica previously reported, the state appeals court found that the article “flatly contradicts the existence of actual malice,” the standard of proof that a public figure must meet to win a libel suit. The appeals court credited the fact that Cohan cited Zeitlin’s denials in the article, provided links to original documents so that readers could judge for themselves and relied on a “host of other sources whose reliability plaintiff does not challenge.” As the opinion put it, “plaintiff’s allegations of actual malice rest largely on his own statements.”
“This is a great victory for diligent journalism in the public interest,” said Jeremy Kutner, ProPublica’s general counsel. “We are thrilled that the courts reaffirmed protections for freedom of the press at a time when that is more important than ever.”
Jay Ward Brown and Emmy Parsons of Ballard Spahr LLP represented Cohan and ProPublica.
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