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Charter Schools Boost Area's Educational Choice: Dual-Language Schools in Santa Fe and Espa?Ola Ready for Registration

Posted on: Monday, 3 April 2006, 03:03 CDT

By John Sena, The Santa Fe New Mexican

Apr. 2--With the opening of two new publicly funded charter schools next fall, families in Santa Fe and Espanola will have more choices in education. But anyone hoping for the Santa Fe school district to open a new south-side elementary school might have to wait a while.

One new offering in Santa Fe will be Charter School 37, whose founders claim will be the only school of its kind in the country.

The curriculum will be taught in both English and Spanish, making it one of only about a dozen dual-language high schools in the country, co-founder Jody Drew said.

The school also will be an Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound school, Drew said, and the combination of dual-language and expeditionary learning is unique. Expeditionary learning uses field trips and hands-on experiences to challenge students in an alternative to classroom work.

The new school already has overcome one of the biggest challenges for a charter school: finding a home. Charter School 37 is scheduled to move to a permanent location in Lamy in the fall of 2008 but initially will be housed at the Santa Fe Indian School campus on Cerrillos Road.

Drew said the school has a one-year lease on the old middle-school building at the Indian School campus and an option for extending the lease.

For its first year, Drew said, the school will serve ninth and 10th graders, with a maximum of 100 students in each grade. An additional class will be added each year for the next two years until the school also has 11th and 12th graders.

Officials have held meetings on the southwest side of town to recruit Spanish-speaking students, Drew said.

The school has already registered some students, but it is holding additional registration dates April 22 and 29 and May 13, Drew said.

A new charter elementary school north of Espanola also is off and running. The state Department of Education had to overrule the local school board to issue a charter to Carinos de Los Ninos, but that didn't hurt the progress of the dual-language elementary school in Ohkay Owingeh (formerly known as San Juan Pueblo).

The school has a principal and is about to hold its first round of registrations. Carinos didn't have to look far for a new home, with St. John the Baptist Catholic Church offering its parish hall as a school building until the school can find a permanent home.

The Rev. Terry Brennan, a founder of the school and a member of its board, said the parish hall was a perfect fit for the school because it was built with moveable partitions and already has a media room for computers.

The school will also focus on agriculture, which is an important part of students' culture and tradition, Brennan said.

The school will get help from a local nursery in setting up a greenhouse, and Brennan said he has been in contact with officials at New Mexico State University's Cooperative Extension Service in Alcalde for help with future agricultural projects.

"We want to be able to keep the language alive and keep the culture of agriculture," Brennan said.

Brennan said the school will hold registration April 11 and 12. The school will host two kindergarten and two firstgrade classes the first year, adding a grade each year until the school serves kindergarten through sixth grade.

Charter schools are publicly funded but have more autonomy from supervision by the local school boards.

The Santa Fe school district had planned to start work on a new school in the near future to deal with an ongoing southward shift in enrollments. However, limited finances and uncertainty about how to free up money to operate the school have put the effort on hold.

The district has the money to build a new school in the Rancho Viejo subdivision south of the city limits. But such a project is in limbo until a planning task force makes a recommendation to the school board, district officials said.

The district has budgeted $10 million in construction funds for a new school from a $73 million bond issue that passed last spring.

However, operating funds are controlled by the state. While Santa Fe's school-age population continues to shift southward, the overall number of students in the district isn't growing. Since a major portion of state funding relies on the number of students in a district, Santa Fe's funding has not increased.

The district, then, cannot hire new teachers or afford utilities and other expenses that come with operating a school.

School officials concede some schools on Santa Fe's north and east sides are underutilized, and consolidating some schools would help free up operational funds. Another option is closing smaller schools.

However, such proposals invariably meet with political resistance.

Officials are hesitant to talk about those possibilities until the district's long-range planning committee makes a recommendation to the board.

They admit, though, that such a recommendation would not be the end of the discussion. "I think that when the strategic-planning task force presents recommendation to the board, a lot of community input will still be needed," Superintendent Leslie Carpenter said.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Santa Fe New Mexican

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Source: The Santa Fe New Mexican

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