Dear Friends,
Our children are our future. That is the guiding tenet of my administration, which is why, upon taking office last year, I revived the New Mexico Children’s Cabinet, which had been dormant for eight years. At the time of its last report, in 2011, our state was facing challenging economic conditions, yet the Children’s Cabinet still recognized the urgent need to invest in our children. Today’s economic climate is very different. New Mexico is enjoying record revenues and, while we are also rebuilding other key institutions after years of neglect, we are finally able to fulfill our long-overdue promise to our children. We’re actively investing in building what will be the nation’s best cradle-to-career education system — a system that will nurture our youngest minds, that will provide family-centered wraparound services as needed, that will remove affordability as a barrier to college. Much of this report is based on year-old data and is not a measure of what we accomplished in this past year. Rather it serves as a critical benchmark that shows how far we need to go to improve outcomes for our children. I am therefore pleased to present the first children’s report card and budget report of the revived New Mexico Children’s Cabinet.
Sincerely,
Michelle Lujan Grisham
New Mexico Governor
