The plan: Ignite reading-buddy fever across the city by marshaling several thousand volunteers to read with struggling kids on a weekly basis. “That’s one of the easiest and most important things that needs to happen,” Love says.

“Frankly, I don’t think that continuing down the current path with the board increases your chance of having a long-term relationship with Santa Fe Public Schools,” SFPS Board of Education Vice President Glenn Wikle wrote Superintendent Bobbie Gutierrez in a February 2011 email. “I’m concerned that it would have the opposite effect.”

When the New Mexico Livestock Board found Bonito, he was so emaciated that he had to gain 300 pounds before be could even be transported from his neglectful owner’s home.

“Vague.” “Disjointed.” “Unlikely to improve student achievement.”

That’s how the US Department of Education described New Mexico’s education reform initiatives when it denied the state’s request to opt out of the federal school rating system.

Santa Fe County is betting on a new highly paid administrator to help it save money in the long run, and it’s willing to overlook his controversial past.

On a clear day in January 2003, Richard James Burick, the retired deputy director of operations at Los Alamos National Laboratory, drove his silver Dodge pickup into the Pajarito Mountain Ski Area parking lot, waved at two workers, circled around and parked the truck. The next time anyone saw him, he was dead from a gunshot wound to the head.

Halfway through lunch period at De Vargas Middle School on Feb. 1, an announcement came over theintercom directing all eighth-grade teachers to report immediately to the cafeteria. One student was “screaming ‘f— you,’ at the top of his lungs” when De Vargas teacher Pat Dixon, who spoke to SFR on condition her real name not be used, arrived at the cafeteria, and several Santa Fe Police officers were on scene.

Check out the sexy version of SFR's weekly matrix--a Love & Sex issue special!

I don’t know whether or not I still believe in the idea of finding your one person. Lately, I like to think everyone, everything is only on loan, the time around them then all the more meaningful. Maybe that’s why I’ve been trying internet dating after all, and why I’m finding it so fun.

For eight months, the state post charged with representing the educational needs of Native American children has been vacant—a fact critics say constitutes serious neglect.