Benally, longtime school board leader, seeks stronger voice for rural McKinley County

Priscilla Benally is asking voters in western McKinley County to turn a long school-board record into a louder voice at the Roundhouse. The Thoreau resident and executive director of the Thoreau Community Center is running in the June 2 Democratic primary for House District 6, where she says her experience with schools, mental health and community needs is already tied to the daily realities of rural Navajo life.

Benally has served 12 years on the Gallup-McKinley County Schools Board of Education and says voters have reelected her three times. Gallup-McKinley County Schools lists her as vice president of the board for District 3. That matters in a district that served 12,439 students in 33 schools in the 2023-2024 school year, with 68.1% of students identified as American Indian or Alaska Native and 64.7% eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. In a school system that large and that poor, Benally’s pitch is not abstract: she has spent years inside the same education fights families keep raising about staffing, access and whether state policy reaches communities like Thoreau, Ramah and the Navajo Nation.

Her campaign also leans on the Yazzie/Martinez education equity case, which began more than a decade ago and led to a 2018 ruling that New Mexico was violating the constitutional rights of at-risk students. In April 2025, Judge Matthew Wilson ordered the Public Education Department to develop a remedial plan after finding the state still had not complied with prior orders. Benally has tied her legislative goals to that fight, arguing that Native students, low-income students, English learners and students with disabilities need a system that answers to them, not just to Santa Fe.

She says she wants to bring back a state Board of Education and argues that communities have been underrepresented for too long when it comes to resources, infrastructure, health care, education and economic development. House District 6 stretches across Cibola and McKinley counties, the Village of Milan, the Pueblo of Zuni and portions of the Navajo Nation, making it one of the most sprawling districts in the state and the most crowded legislative primary in New Mexico this year, with four Democrats in the race.

Benally’s local record gives her credibility on school policy, but the limits of a House seat still matter. She cannot directly run Gallup-McKinley County Schools from Santa Fe, and she cannot fix every road, clinic or utility gap that rural families face. What she can do is push state money, oversight and legislation toward places like Thoreau and Zuni, where the consequences of underfunding are visible in the classroom and beyond it. GMCS’s spring 2026 listening tour, including a May 7 stop at Ramah High School, showed those frustrations were still very much alive.