State: SFPS grade falls to D
22 more of New Mexico’s 89 districts also saw ratings drop from last year
Santa Fe Public Schools earned a D in its annual district report card from the state Public Education Department, a downgrade from a C in 2017 and a reflection of the state’s largely negative overall evaluation of individual public schools in the district.
Public Education Secretary-designate Christopher Ruszkowski said Santa Fe was one of four large districts in the state to see a year-to-year dip. Belen and Bernalillo also fell from C’s to D’s, and Alamogordo fell from a B to a C.
Statewide, 23 of the state’s 89 public school districts saw their grades fall, while six saw an improved grade from 2017. Five districts earned an A, all of them very small: Cloudcroft, Corona, Des Moines, Melrose and Tatum.
The district report cards, mandatory for decades under state and federal laws, weight the size of schools in providing a cumulative score using each district’s individual school grades within the state’s controversial and much-maligned A-F system.
In statewide school grades issued earlier this fall, more than half of Santa Fe’s public schools received D’s or F’s, and Ruszkowski took aim at Superintendent Veronica García. “When a district is not doing well, you have to look at its superintendent,” Ruszkowski said at the time, calling Santa Fe a “district in crisis.”
García fired back that Ruszkowski was “engaging in political warfare” for singling out her district in his state news release, asserting that student achievement rates in Santa Fe have risen.
On Thursday, Ruszkowski said his August statement “still holds true” but did not mention García, herself a former state education secretary.
“I think the district does need to be in a state of ‘This is an urgent situation,’ ” Ruszkowski said of Santa Fe Public Schools. “The academic rigor and the instructional delivery — the quality of those things — needs to go up dramatically. Because right now the district is on a downward trajectory.”
He cited a few exceptions, including Piñon Elementary and the Academy for Technology and the Classics, a district-authorized charter school, both of which earned A’s.
García, who last week predicted big improvements for Santa Fe during her annual address on the state of the district, on Thursday said she wouldn’t get into a bickering match with Ruszkowski. She noted his department issued a report on academic proficiency in July that highlighted Santa Fe among districts in the state that are “starting to show meaningful academic progress … and will continue on an upward trajectory if we as a state ensure consistency for them.”
“That’s from them; that’s not from me,” García said. “That’s my response to his comment. That’s all I really want to say.
“The school grading has been questionable at best,” she added. “It’s not been transparent. And we are focused on improved student outcomes.”
Before earning a C in 2017, Santa Fe Public Schools received a D from the state in 2016, which followed four straight years of C grades.
In the 2018 individual school facility grades, the local district saw eight schools receive an F, eight receive a D, four receive a C, five receive a B and four receive an A.
Others districts near Santa Fe remained steady from 2017, with the exception of Los Alamos, which saw its grade dip to a B from an A. That was better than Española, Pecos and Pojoaque, all of which earned D’s.