SFPS considers if any schools should close
Future of four campuses will be decided later this month, including Turquoise Trail
The Santa Fe school board plans to make a decision this month that could affect the future of three elementary schools and a district-owned building that now serves as the home of a state-chartered school south of the city.
While no board member explicitly recommended closing any one of the four campuses involved in the possible shuffle — Chaparral, E.J. Martinez and Nava elementary schools and Turquoise Trail Charter Elementary — board member Maureen Cashmon said the district has to face the fact that shutdowns are inevitable.
“We have too many facilities. We can’t maintain them all,” Cashmon said during a study session Tuesday evening that focused on the four facilities. “We have to stop the anguishing,” she said. “… We need to close some facilities … no matter how painful it is.”
The board has been grappling for a year over what to do with the three midtown elementary schools, just a couple of miles apart, which all have seen stagnant or declining enrollment in recent years and require costly renovations. Plans to close two of them, E.J. Martinez and Nava, and send most of the students to nearby Chaparral sparked outrage and prompted community protests last spring.
At the time, board members and administrators were predicting a multimillion-dollar budget gap due to state funding cuts. They later said the shortfall would be much smaller,
delaying the need to address concerns about the facilities.
The board on Tuesday discussed a need to act soon, however, after reviewing a nearly 90-page report examining the value of each campus and other factors — including enrollment figures, the cost to upgrade or replace each facility and the potential effects on hundreds of families with students attending those schools and neighbors surrounding the campuses.
During a public meeting May 29, the board will consider a proposal that could include rebuilding Chaparral; taking over the Turquoise Trail building in 2021 when the charter school’s lease expires to help ease overcrowding in south-side district schools; offering the E.J. Martinez building as a new home for the charter school; and “repurposing” Nava. Potential new uses for Nava were unclear.
Board President Steven Carrillo said he was not ready to make a decision on closing any school without gathering community input.
But, he said, “The decision to rebuild Chaparral is patently obvious.”
The newest of the three schools and the one with the highest student capacity, Chaparral is worth more than the other two schools, according the report, and it would be more centrally located to serve a shifting student population in a redrawn school zone.
Enrollment there is expected to hold steady, while numbers at Nava and E.J. Martinez are predicted to continue declining.
Superintendent Veronica García told the board that the future of Turquoise Trail, which will need an alternate facility after its lease expires in June 2021, must be included in the discussion of the midtown schools.
The district has said it will not renew the charter’s lease because it needs space for Santa Fe Public School students living in communities south of the city.
Based on a district analysis, García said, more than 200 of the 465 students at Turquoise Trail do not live in what would be the school’s massive enrollment zone if it were operated as a district school. Meanwhile, many district students are bused from areas such as Lone Butte and the village of Cerrillos to Amy Biehl Community School, which already is over capacity.
Complicating the issue, the charter school’s leaders have said they will refuse to vacate the property on N.M. 14 and have threatened to take the issue to court.
The school, now offering pre-K through sixth grade, also has said it plans to expand by offering media arts-focused seventhand eighth-grade classes on the campus of the nearby Santa Fe Studios — an announcement last month that surprised several school board members.
“We are set on staying here,” Turquoise Trail Principal Ray Griffin said when the plan was unveiled.