Mary Sanchez

In 1981, a Missouri governor with a heart for children and an appreciation for research, backed what grew into a national program to guide parents as their children’s first teachers.

Later, after he became a U.S. senator, Christopher “Kit” Bond continued this advocacy.

The Parents as Teachers model was among the first to educate broad swaths of moms and dads about the tremendous developmental leaps that child brains make, from birth to age five.

By visiting parents in their homes, trained parent educators worked in close collaboration with families.

The program continues as a nonprofit, and focuses on meeting parents to offer resources. Parent educators are not there to evaluate or to judge parents on their educating skills, or how they are raising their children.

Bond, a lifelong Republican, died on May 13 at the age of 86.

His death preceded by mere days the 60th anniversary of the nation’s far better-known investment into early childhood, Head Start, a program that also focuses on the early childhood development of children from low-income families, including those from rural areas.

And now, Head Start is threatened.

The Heritage Foundation called for the program to be eliminated in the foundation’s script for governmental cruelty and chaos, Project 2025.

Regional Head Start offices have already been slashed by DOGE, with half of them shuttered and employees laid off.

Head Start funding from the federal government has also slowed. That, in turn, has caused some preschools that host Head Start to close.

The program had been serving about 750,000 low-income and homeless children. Parents as Teachers served about 223,000 children in 2024.

Assurances have been made in recent days that Head Start will be funded under the Trump administration’s 2026 budget. But early budget drafts don’t show an appropriation for it, adding to the unease.

Also, there’s a track record here. During his first presidency, Donald Trump tried to cut Head Start’s budget by 25 percent. Head Start includes aid that is crucial to the security of working families in that it supports childcare.

So pardon child advocates who remain leery of the Trump administration’s promises. After all, Trump is the cultish leader of a GOP that has shifted dramatically in recent years on how it supports families.

The GOP of today is not the GOP of Bond’s years.

First, families have to be the right kind of family for the GOP to believe in and care about. Their support does not extend to gay couples with children, for example.

They are also not supportive of families whose members are experiencing gender dysphoria.

Such family structures have always existed, but they weren’t paraded out there for public ridicule, as targets to be bashed for political fundraising.

Today, some of the most vocal members of the GOP argue for empowering parents who want to oversee the education of all children, not just their own.

The best examples are parents who are given a broad platform to complain about which books are available in public school libraries. Their efforts to limit some books wind up as shelves of prohibited literature, off limits to everyone.

The GOP’s latest song and dance is to push vouchers and public tax dollars for private schools.

It showers blame on low-income households as the party moves aggressively to cut billions of dollars from programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). It labels low-income parents as lazy, unfit, and basically blames them for all their household struggles.

Bond, in tributes posted after his death, claimed his Parents as Teachers program in Missouri as one of his top accomplishments – this, from a man who has a massive bridge named in his honor in Kansas City arching over the Missouri River, and a record of securing millions in funding for other prominent – some opulent – projects across the state.

Bond valued families, but with words and actions that feel so different from how today’s GOP party leaders behave.

There are deep similarities in the two programs, Parents as Teachers and Head Start.

Both lean into science and growing research on the brain development of babies and toddlers.

Both seek to work alongside families, not to treat parents in a condescending way, but to empower them as their children’s most influential early educators.

And most importantly, both programs are steeped with the attitude that the government can play a positive role in strengthening families.

But the distance between Bond’s early championing of science-backed childhood education measures and his party’s most vocal efforts today are stark and continue to grow more disturbing and harmful.

May Bond rest in peace, with the satisfaction of a job well done.

And may his party revert to Bond’s sense of moderate, measured, and meaningful support for families and children.

Mary Sanchez writes for the Tribune Content Agency.

Sherry Robinson

In August 2011 Gov. Susana Martinez stood before her predecessor’s jet, festooned with a big “SOLD” sign.

“Last year when I was running for governor, I not only promised taxpayers that I would not use this state jet as a personal air taxi, I promised New Mexicans across the state that I would get rid of this symbol of greed and excess in state government,” she said. “And today, I make good on that promise.”

Then she hugged the buyers, handed them the keys and waved as the plane taxied down the runway. Sale price: $2.5 million.

Gov. Bill Richardson’s administration acquired the Cessna Citation Bravo in 2005 for $5.5 million after the state sold his aging turboprop. The new twin-engine business jet, with a top speed upwards of 450 miles per hour, could get Richardson to Hobbs in 45 minutes and to nearly any other airport in the state in 35 minutes.

Richardson got his shiny man-toy after leaning on legislators for $5 million. It was the most expensive state aircraft in the region and the only state-owned jet in the Southwest.

Republican radio ads said the plane was proof of Richardson’s “lifestyle of the rich and famous.” It didn’t help that Richardson had used the jet to fly to Los Alamos, which took 25 minutes compared with a 45-minute drive.

Within two years, the jet’s appeal had dulled as political heat increased. Now an aspiring presidential candidate, Richardson announced in 2007 he would give up the Cessna Citation Bravo in favor of five Eclipse 500 very-light jets, manufactured in Albuquerque.

“The governor feels the time is right to convey a friendlier, folksier, more accessible image,” a spokesman told Aero News Network, “A smaller, more personable aircraft ties into this image quite nicely.” The spokesman referred to the five small jets as “the Richardson Air Force.”

But the economy tipped into the Great Recession, and the Eclipse purchase never came off. The jet became political fuel for Susana Martinez and political baggage for the Democrats. During her campaign she even had billboards declaring, “Sell the jet!”

In early 2011 the newly elected Martinez said: “At a time when New Mexicans are struggling to make ends meet, their governor should not be leading a life of privilege. We will get rid of that ultimate symbol of waste and excess; we will sell the state’s luxury jet.”

I wrote in 2011: “The jet has been more useful to Martinez on the ground than it was to Richardson in the air.” It was a simple issue that fit on a billboard, and it resonated with the public.

Now the Republicans are about to learn the same lesson.

The president wants to accept a gift from the Qatari royal family of a $400 million jumbo jet, dubbed the “flying palace” and “Arab Force One.” Yes, it violates the clause in the Constitution that bars officials from accepting gifts “from any King, Prince, or foreign State” unless Congress approves. Yes, it’s a gift from a nation that supports Hamas and hasn’t always had our best interests at heart. Yes, retrofitting the aircraft to meet security and communications needs could cost taxpayers a bundle, and the government wouldn’t even keep it. And, yes, the optics are really, really bad.

U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-South Dakota, observed: “I don’t like it. There’s a reason that people can’t even buy me a steak dinner. It’s not necessarily that you can prove I have an ethical problem, it’s that the appearance of it doesn’t look great.”

Former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley summarized it well: “Accepting gifts from foreign nations is never a good practice. It threatens intelligence and national security, especially when that nation supports a terrorist organization and allows those terrorist regimes to live on its soil. Regardless of how beautiful the plane may be, it opens a door and implies the President and U.S. can be bought. If this were Biden, we would be furious.”

There’s one thing they forgot. Like Richardson’s business jet, this latest man-toy will be a potent symbol that won’t go away. Expect to see it flying in thousands of campaign advertisements during midterm campaigns.

Sherry Robinson is a longtime New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. She is the author of four books. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.

Trip Jennings

Southern sheriffs have threatened to arrest me, and I’ve landed on more than one governor’s blacklist. So aggravating has been my persistence that, on occasion, spokespeople for elected officials have hollered at me in public.

A journalist’s life in the United States is not for the timid. However, I’ve never felt physically in danger.

I thought about this last week as I sat with journalists from around South America and Latin America. The gaggle was seated around a table in a legislative committee room at the Roundhouse in Santa Fe thanks to a U.S. State Department-funded initiative called the Edward Murrow Program for Journalists.

These visits are a yearly tradition for me. Every spring an email hits my inbox from Global Santa Fe, formerly known as the Santa Fe Council on International Relations, asking me to visit with journalists from elsewhere. The reporters, editors and journalism professors I’ve visited with over the years have hailed from countries too numerous to list but Venezuela, Latvia, Germany, Russia, Belarus, Mexico, Namibia, El Salvador and Colombia come to mind.

Yet, last week’s visit felt different. Maybe it was the stories the journalists told and the questions they asked.

Some had truly harrowing tales.

There was the young woman living in exile because it is too dangerous to practice independent journalism in her native Nicaragua, where the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo have cracked down on protesters and the journalists who report on them. And the young woman from Ecuador who is accompanied by military escorts everywhere she goes in public because she could be kidnapped. Long a peaceful place, Ecuador has erupted into violence over the last half decade as drug trafficking and gang violence have risen. Last year, cartel members, armed with explosives, took television broadcasters hostage in front of a live audience.

I was still digesting this recounting of journalistic life in these countries when a young woman from Bolivia asked how my mental health was, seeing as how journalism is so embattled.

I thought for a moment. I had no harrowing tales of my own to regale the group with. Being yelled at is not fun. Neither is a sheriff poking his finger angrily in your chest while threatening you with arrest or governors banning you from press conferences. But I have never had to contemplate whether the questions I ask public officials might lead to my being disappeared.

I said as much and told the visitors they were truly the courageous ones doing journalism in the face of existential threats.

These days, my fears about journalism in the U.S. focus more on the withering away of the news industry than any potential violence. I believe fervently, now more than ever, the country needs journalists to make sense of all that is happening here in the U.S. and around the globe.

I know not everyone agrees with me.

Then came the question I had expected all along: What about the Trump administration? Will U.S. journalists become targets; their lives made miserable, even dangerous?

It is unquestionably a weird time to work as a journalist in the U.S., especially for those of us who’ve been doing the job for years and remember a different time.

It is a fact that President Donald Trump poses the biggest challenge in my lifetime to journalism as we’ve known it, especially those media outlets that attempt to cover his administration impartially. However, the threat, it seems to me, is more financial than physical: in the form of bogus lawsuits filed to intimidate intrepid reporters and their editors — and drain much-needed resources — and in presidential calls to eliminate federal dollars that support NPR and PBS.

But could it become so bad for journalists that they will have to worry about their safety?

It’s hard for me to envision such a future. But I’m aware enough of my own limitations to understand that predicting the future based on a past in which violence against journalists is off limits doesn’t promise a violence-free future. Such prognostication works until it doesn’t. Sometimes, systems collapse, and with them societal norms.

Are we nearing that point of collapse in our country? I don’t think so, but I’ll hedge by saying it’s too soon to tell.

During the conversation I told the visiting journalists I used to laugh at my mother when she would recoil from the latest version of Trip-angered-another-public official and counsel me to be careful over the phone. Even as a young reporter, I knew the high cost a public official would pay for physically harming a journalist. Although reporters in the U.S. have been assassinated over the last half century, that kind of violence is rare in our country.

I’m not sure we live in that country anymore. Trump and his administration don’t worry me as much as a lone wolf who feels a sense of destiny and a desire to rid the world of pesky irritants that make life harder for the current president and his administration.

What I didn’t tell the visiting journalists is that if my mom were still around, I’d still laugh at her warning. But I’d thank her for being aware of how truly mystifying it is to be a journalist in the U.S. these days.

Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut where he reported on many stories, including the resignation and incarceration of Connecticut’s then-governor, John Rowland, and gang warfare in California. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.