Board votes to halt transfers
Education officials aim to curb student overpopulation in city’s south-side schools
The lopsided nature of student enrollment in Santa Fe — it’s packed in some of the schools on the south side but lighter almost everywhere else — has prompted the school board to stop any interzone transfers to a pair of schools considered desirable by some parents.
The board voted 5-0 Tuesday night to limit transfers into Amy Biehl Community School and Milagro Middle School as part of a larger and still-unrealized plan to redistribute student population more evenly around the city’s schools.
“Obviously, the south-side schools are busting at the seams,” said board member Rudy Garcia, who was sworn in as a new member at the start of the meeting.
The district has grappled for years with certain schools being crowded and others being light on enrollment. Efforts to ease crowding at south-side schools over the past seven years led to the building of new K-8 schools, including Amy Biehl, El Camino Real Academy and Nina Otero Community School.
Nevertheless, a new enrollment report that analyzes city and county data on housing development factors, birth rates and population shifts indicates that enrollment demand will continue to slowly grow at most southside schools over the next five to 10 years.
For example, the crowded Amy Biehl Community School has 543 students but is expected to expand to about 600 by 2027-28. Ramirez Thomas Elementary and El Camino Real Academy are two other southside schools that will probably experience increased student enrollment.
Milagro Middle School has 615 students but is expected to have 660 next year and then reach up to nearly 700 the following year. The school, which opened this year at the former Capshaw Middle School campus on West Zia
Road, is expected to move in 2019 to the more centrally located campus that once housed De Vargas Middle School.
The report also predicts stable enrollment for many schools — Carlos Gilbert Elementary School downtown, for example — while others will see shrinking student numbers, like Gonzales Community School near downtown.
One way to pare back these numbers is to prioritize students who live in the same district, or zone, as the school. At the same time, limiting interzone transfers also would help, Superintendent Veronica García and several school board members said Tuesday.
The board voted to suspend interzone transfer decisions for all schools until it comes up with a plan to place an enrollment cap on schools. That will not happen until at least January, when the district reopens following the winter break. Among the other options the board may take in the new year to deal with overflow enrollment at other schools is to limit transfers into some of the schools.
While south-side schools are bulging, several other schools in the district are facing stagnant or declining enrollment, including E.J. Martinez Elementary School and Nava Elementary School. Earlier this year, the board considered closing one or both of those facilities, an unpopular move that was met with fierce opposition from parents, students and staff members, resulting in the board abandoning any such action.
Tuesday’s board discussion also indicated the district wants to reclaim a facility it owns off N.M. 14 that currently houses Turquoise Trail Charter Elementary School, a state charter serving 510 students. The school leases the site from the district.
But both Ray Griffin, principal of Turquoise Trail, and lawyer Patty Matthews said that would be difficult for the district to do because of the state’s charter school law, which includes a statute that governs facility use.
“The statute makes it clear that if a [district] facility is currently being used for other educational purposes, the district does not have to offer it to a charter school,” said Matthews, a charter school law expert. “But when in fact it is being used as a charter school, there is nothing in statute that gives districts the right to tell the charter school it has to leave. … The charter school, once it is there, has the right to stay there.”
Griffin said the school would fight any effort the district might make to force it to relocate or close once its current lease expires.
“We are in this building,” he said. “We intend to stay in this building. … Why would you make a whole group of kids move?”
In a follow-up interview Wednesday, García said of the potential conflict, “If you have a lease, you have a lease. We have a need. We will deal with that issue as it develops.”