The Understory

Transforming What We Face Into How We Flourish

Spring 2026 | Issue 27

PRO 21st Annual Conference: Follow-Up Report

When School Doesn’t Work: Pathways to a Diploma and Employment

For Neurodivergent Students and Young Adults

Belle is whip-smart. Anyone who spends five minutes with her knows it. But school was a different story. The fluorescent lights, the noise, the rigid schedules, the expectation that she perform on demand in an environment that felt physically overwhelming. It wore her down until she stopped going. She got her GED instead, which felt like a solution at the time.

It wasn’t.

Without a diploma, doors that should have been open to someone of her ability were closed. She pursued her passions on her own terms (she has plenty of them), but her ADHD made sustained, independent progress hard to hold onto. Meanwhile, at home, the situation was quietly becoming a crisis. Belle’s sibling was also struggling to launch. Two adult kids back in the nest, everyone stressed and confused, parents trying to stay hopeful while privately wondering how this had become their life.

Belle decided to move out. Her parents helped her with a small apartment. She tried a job. After one week she was let go. The sensory demands of being “on” all day were more than the work environment could accommodate or she could sustain. The living situation fell apart too, and Belle came home.

Six months followed. Some of it was very rough. Her inner critic got loud. The uncertainty was hard on everyone. She tried again: a different kind of job, something she thought she’d love. The first day ran long, the way first days often do. Somewhere between hour eight and hour nine of training, she asked to leave. They let her go.

Belle is not lazy. She is not incapable. She is someone who needs the right conditions: an employer who understands sensory needs, a pace that builds gradually, support that doesn’t disappear after the first week. Those conditions exist. They are not easy to find, but they exist. This newsletter is, in part, a map to where they are.

The two questions this newsletter addresses are ones Belle’s story raises directly: How can a neurodivergent student earn a high school diploma when the traditional path hasn’t worked? And: Once they’re out of school, how do they find employment with support?

The answers come from follow-up conversations after PRO’s 21st Annual Conference, one with Keila Dominguez, Assistant Director of Future Focused Education, and one with Alix Dean of the NM Health Care Authority.

Part One

A Different Way to Earn a Diploma

Capstone Projects and New Mexico’s New Graduation Law

In February 2024, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed House Bill 171 (HB 171) into law, marking the first overhaul of New Mexico’s high school graduation requirements in over a decade. The law applies to students entering ninth grade in the 2025–2026 school year and joins a national trend of states moving away from rigid standardized testing as the gatekeeper for a diploma.

Nationally, the number of states requiring students to pass high-stakes exit exams to graduate has been dropping sharply for years, from 24 states in 2013–14 to just 6 today (Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, New Jersey, Texas, and Virginia). New Mexico’s new law eliminates its own “demonstrations of competency” testing requirement and, crucially, opens the door to capstone projects as a meaningful, recognized route to graduation. This is especially significant for neurodivergent students.

Two Diploma Pathways

Under HB 171, New Mexico high school students have two pathways to a diploma:

•Standard Diploma of Excellence: 24 credits aligned to state standards. The new law adds significant flexibility in how those credits are earned: through Career Technical Education (CTE), work-based learning, internships, and most importantly, capstone courses. Supports and accommodations remain available throughout.

•Ability Diploma Pathway: Designed specifically for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities, as identified by the student’s IEP team. This pathway requires an IEP and is for students whose learning and daily living skills are well below age expectations and who need intensive, ongoing support.

Important distinction for families

Most neurodivergent students, including those with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and other learning differences, are not on the Ability Diploma Pathway. They are working toward the standard Diploma of Excellence, and it is this pathway where capstone projects open up meaningful new options.

What Is a Capstone Project?

A capstone is not a test. Under New Mexico law, it is “a multifaceted academic and intellectual experience… that culminates in a final product, performance, or presentation… to an evaluation panel convened by the public school.” In plain terms: a student identifies something they genuinely care about, works on it over time, and presents what they learned and built to a real audience.

Capstone topics can be anything: designing housing for people without homes, building dog houses for neighbors’ dogs left outside in all weather, researching a cultural tradition, launching a small business, creating a community resource. The student’s passion drives the project. The learning follows naturally.

Why This Matters Especially for Neurodivergent Students

For a student with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, or other learning differences, the traditional school experience often fails in very specific ways: timed tests penalize processing speed differences; noisy, fluorescent-lit classrooms create sensory overwhelm; rigid schedules clash with attention patterns; abstract academic content disconnects from anything that feels real. The GPA and test score model rewards a narrow band of cognitive styles.

The capstone model turns this on its head. It rewards:

•Deep focus on a self-chosen topic, a strength for many autistic and ADHD learners

•Real-world problem-solving over standardized test performance

•Flexible pacing and working styles

•Demonstrating competency through doing, not just recalling

•Communication and collaboration in authentic contexts

For students whose neurodivergence is compounded by other life circumstances (housing instability, immigrant families navigating an unfamiliar system, other forms of stress), the capstone model also offers something schools rarely provide: a sense of agency, purpose, and genuine belonging.

Lexy’s Story

Keila shared a video about Lexy Aragon, a student at Del Norte High School in Albuquerque. Let's just say that Lexy had extenuating circumstances in her life that inspired her to work in the area that she chose and had reasons that made school challenging for her.

Through her capstone internship with East Central Ministries, Lexy became a key contributor to a community land trust working on housing for people experiencing homelessness. She helped feed an estimated 400 people, participated in housing design conversations, and built real-world skills in communication, math, and project management, which she then demonstrated in a presentation to a community panel.

“Her experience not only provided valuable career skills but also made a significant contribution to the community,” Future Focused Education, on Lexy’s capstone.

Lexy’s story is not an outlier. Future Focused Education’s broader partnership with Del Norte High School served 115 students: all economically disadvantaged, 82% from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds, and achieved a 100% retention and graduation rate, with every senior continuing on to post-secondary education.

The Longer View: Why This Matters for Life After School

We need to say something plainly here, because it is something many families know but rarely hear acknowledged: dropping out of high school, or graduating without real skills, confidence, and work experience, can set off a chain of difficulties that is very hard to reverse.

For neurodivergent young people especially, the transition to adulthood is full of new demands: navigating a workplace environment, managing sensory overload in a new setting, building professional relationships, sustaining focus on tasks that may not be intrinsically motivating. Without the foundation of a diploma and some real-world experience of success, these challenges can compound into years of being stuck.

A well-designed capstone project builds exactly the capacities that matter for this transition: finishing what you start, communicating across differences, managing a project over time, and knowing you are capable of doing hard things. It is preparation not just for graduation but for what comes after: the kind of real working experience that helps a young person not graduate to the couch.

Schools Leading the Way

Los Lunas Schools has implemented the capstone model across their entire student population. Another example from New Mexico:

•Zuni High School: Seniors created a curriculum and website preserving traditional Zuni garment-making, connecting culture, language, and technical skill.

About Future Focused Education

Future Focused Education is a statewide educational intermediary organization that partners with New Mexico schools, districts, and communities to transform what learning looks like. Their EQ2 (Equipped for Equity) initiative supports schools in designing community-defined Graduate Profiles and community-connected Capstones. They hold regular meetings with partners and employers to build the real-world connections that make capstone projects possible.

Keila Dominguez, as Assistant Director of FFE, with Dr Lisa Harmon Martinez who is FFE's Director, lead the graduate profile and capstone work. Keila, a second-generation Mexican-American from Albuquerque’s International District, brings both professional expertise and lived experience to this work.

futurefocusededucation.org, including documentary films of student capstone projects under Youth Voices

Belle dropped out before New Mexico’s new graduation law existed. A capstone project rooted in something she genuinely cared about, evaluated by people who understood her strengths, at a pace that matched how her mind works, might have changed her trajectory entirely. It might still change someone else’s.

But for young people who are already out of school, already past the diploma question, the urgent need is different: how do you build the skills to become employed, and simultaneously build the skills to live independently, when both feel impossibly hard at once? The answer, it turns out, is: slowly, and with the right support. We’ll explore that in a future issue.

Report compiled from PRO 21st Annual Conference and follow-up conversations, May 2026

This Summer

This Summer’s Course Is For Parents Like You

This newsletter addresses what happens when school doesn’t work, and what comes next. That is exactly why Beyond Behavior: The Regulation Roadmap exists. This summer’s course is designed for parents of neurodivergent children at every age and stage, including parents of young adults who are still finding their footing. Because the need to regulate our own nervous systems, to hold the worry, the uncertainty, and the hope without being consumed by it, does not stop when our children turn eighteen. If anything, it gets harder.

The course brings together three frameworks that change what becomes possible: Mindful Self-Compassion, Polyvagal Theory, and Internal Family Systems. Together they help you understand what is happening in your nervous system, and in your child’s, and how to become the steady presence they need, at any age.

Coming up next: Summer is almost here, and for neurodivergent kids of every age, the loss of routine that comes with it can be quietly destabilizing. In our next issue we look at what summer structure can look like across ages, and how a first job might be exactly the scaffolding a neurodivergent teen needs.

And coming soon: What does it mean when your child feels everything more intensely than others around them? The overlap between highly sensitive kids and neurodivergent kids is real, the distinctions matter, and understanding both changes what becomes possible as a parent.

Addressing Your Family's Unique Needs

If your child is struggling to find their footing in school, or has already left without a diploma and doesn't know what's next, let's talk. In a free 30-minute consultation we look at your specific situation: your child's wiring, what has and hasn't worked, and what a realistic path forward looks like. Not a generic plan. A particular one.

Book a 30 min Consultation Now

With compassion, Janine