New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is moving from complaints to enforcement mode after a 2023 investigation into Gallup-McKinley County Schools turned up “substantial racial disparities” in how students are disciplined. The report, released last week by the state’s Department of Justice, found Indigenous students lose eight to 10 times more classroom days to suspensions than white students for similar infractions, and Hispanic students lose three to four times as many days.

This is not a small disparity at the margins. The district being studied, Gallup-McKinley, is sprawling, about twice the size of Delaware, straddling part of the Navajo Nation, and it has the largest Native American student population of any public school district in the country. In other words, when the data points like this do not add up, the fallout hits real people and real education outcomes, fast.

Here is what the investigators said they reviewed and why it became such a big deal politically and operationally. The investigation was ordered by Torrez after reporting by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica exposed the district’s high rates of harsh punishment for Native and Hispanic children. According to the report, Indigenous students lose far more classroom time to suspensions, and earlier reporting also found Native students in New Mexico are expelled far more often than any other group.

The discipline pattern shows up across grades, not just older students. Investigators pointed out that the disparity was evident even in kindergarten and elementary grades, for “ambiguous infractions such as ‘disorderly conduct.’” That matters because ambiguous categories are exactly where systems can drift from “consistent enforcement” into something closer to “uneven discretion,” whether that is caused by policy design, implementation, or both. The report also highlights a scale problem: Gallup-McKinley has a quarter of New Mexico’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions during the four school years ending in 2020.

The district has pushed back. At the time of the earlier coverage, former superintendent Mike Hyatt called the news organizations’ reporting “completely false,” and suggested the findings were tied to data entry errors and the district’s broad definition of expulsion. Hyatt has retired and could not be reached for comment. But in last week’s report, state Department of Justice investigators said neither explanation accounted for the racial disparities. Investigators also said the earlier audit trail the district provided did not reconcile.

In 2023, after New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica published their reporting, the district provided a contract auditor with discipline data that was “inexplicably different” from what it reported to state and U.S. departments of Education, with thousands of disciplinary records missing. The investigators said they could not verify the district’s assertion that it dramatically reduced out-of-school suspensions. They also criticized the district’s response directionally: the new AG report said that “instead of taking steps to rectify these problems,” leadership denied that they exist and pursued a “misleading and flawed counter-analysis.”

So what does reform actually mean in this report? The state Department of Justice recommends that Gallup-McKinley officials “acknowledge the facts” and work with the community to remedy an “excessive reliance on exclusionary and discriminatory discipline.” Among the recommendations: district officials should clearly define infractions and penalty ranges, make punishments proportional, and limit suspensions. The report also calls for adopting restorative justice alternatives, including “talking circles,” where students discuss how their misbehavior affected others, why they broke a school rule, and what other choices they could have made instead. The Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission called for similar reforms in its own March 2026 report on discrimination at Gallup-McKinley schools.

This is where the stakes spread beyond academics into day-to-day life. Investigators wrote that until discipline policies are fixed, “children in and around Gallup, along with their families and communities, will remain negatively affected by educational, social, and emotional challenges” from current practices. They also said out-of-school suspensions can deny access to free meals and participation in extracurricular clubs and volunteer activities. National research, as summarized in the report, links suspension and expulsion to lower academic achievement, a higher risk of contact with the criminal justice system, isolation, poor health, and lower wages.

For executives, boards, and anyone who thinks of schools as purely local operations, the report comes with an important regulatory subplot. The new report also calls on state lawmakers and the New Mexico Public Education Department to strengthen oversight of student discipline statewide. It recommends audits at the state level at least once a year and making those audits public, plus requiring that students who are suspended or expelled receive instruction and other educational services while they are out of school. One reason this matters is simple: the investigators warn that disparities should not become as “extreme and systemic as in Gallup-McKinley.”

The oversight fight has already hit a legal wall. The report urges lawmakers to revisit legislation that would have given the AG’s office stronger investigative tools to “identify and root out” civil rights violations. That legislation passed in 2023, but Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, let the bill die via a “pocket veto.” The governor’s spokesperson, in an email on Wednesday, said she stands by her decision, arguing it is unclear whether the new powers would have “trump[ed] federal student privacy protections” and allowed the AG access to confidential student records.

Meanwhile, the district itself says it is reviewing the report and “current student data” as part of a broader transition. Gallup-McKinley Superintendent Jvanna Hanks II told New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica that she is leading a period of transition prioritizing community voices and renews the focus on every student, with an emphasis that students should be in school, supported in school, and treated fairly.

Here is why this should matter to leaders far beyond New Mexico. When a state DOJ report documents disparities like “8 to 10 times” classroom-day loss tied to suspension outcomes, it signals something deeper than one bad semester. It indicates how systems, definitions, data practices, and enforcement discretion can compound harm, and it shows regulators are willing to escalate oversight, audit discipline data, and push restorative alternatives. For school district leaders and education-adjacent operators, the message is clear: you cannot treat discipline data as a compliance afterthought. It is a civil rights risk, an operational risk, and an outcomes risk, all at the same time.