‘Learning never happens in isolation’
Social-emotional learning, community schools model seen as vital to Taos Schools
Data published in the most recent NMVistas report card show institutions within Taos Municipal Schools District have improved student outcomes since 2022, but the district still has an uphill battle ahead as they pull Taos Middle School and Taos High School away from the bottom 5 percent of New Mexico schools.
Two district schools, Ranchos Elementary and Enos Garcia Elementary, received “traditional” rankings, placing them below the top 25 percent of schools in New Mexico, whereas Arroyos del Norte Elementary was placed in the top 15 percent and Taos Charter in the top 10 percent.
According to Taos Municipal Schools Interim Superintendent Renetta Mondragon, the pandemic forced the district to address students at risk of academic failure, especially in reading and mathematics. Since the pandemic, the district has benefited from relief funds that have support educational initiatives, tutors and substitute teachers. These initiatives, among others, are helping the district regain its footing.
“It’s been hard for students to re-socialize with their peers,” Mondragon said. “When it comes to our extracurricular activities, it’s been a little bit harder to draw our students back in because they’re wanting to go home and isolate themselves more than what we had normally seen. This is just my observation. We used to have these huge, huge waiting lists for after-school programs, and now it’s dropped from what it used to be.”
When it came to literacy, the New Mexico Public Education Department hit the ground running with initiatives and ideas to reinforce literacy among students statewide. The implementation of several initiatives saw an increase in grant money for schools and districts across New Mexico, allowing them to hire reading interventionists and coaches. Since, the state has shown a slow increase in literacy scores.
Mondragon said math is the latest area of concern. According to NMVistas, Taos High math scores went from less than 20 percent proficiency in 2022 to 16 percent in 2023. Taos Middle School went from 14 percent proficiency to 12 percent. Meanwhile, Taos High’s reading proficiency has remained stagnant at 38 percent, and Taos Middle School increased from 32 percent in 2022 to 35 percent in 2023.
Mondragon hopes to see the implementation of Math 180, an initiative that attempts to accelerate mathematics education. Regardless of her attention to math, Mondragon said there are more challenges in the way than there were with meeting literacy goals — which she said also still require progress. According to her, math teachers are much more difficult to find. Mondragon’s goal is to have a math coach in each school by 2025.
Tutoring is a necessity for students within the district, and while resources exist, Mondragon said funding them remains a challenge, which she expects to become even more onerous next year, when COVID relief funds cease. On March 11, 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act was signed into law, providing $1.9 trillion to schools nationwide. However, this pool will dry by Sept. 30.This
fund supports socialemotional learning (SEL) for many schools and districts around the country. SEL describes a framework that places the social and emotional needs of students at the forefront of education.
Bonavita Quinto-MacCallum, the SEL coordinator for Taos Schools, argued SEL is necessary now more than ever, especially since those students who attended school during the pandemic are still feeling the effects of prolonged isolation. According to her, students were unable to participate in important activities like school dances or student government, where they could learn important leadership lessons. They were unable to participate in athletics or extracurriculars, where they were able to socialize with peers.
“You had those young children that were in first, second or third grade and for three years didn’t get any interaction with any other students,” Quinto-MacCallum said. “They didn’t have any opportunity to develop a self-awareness of who they are, how to self-manage, even how emotions become behaviors.”
Quinto-MacCallum said SEL helps students in their ability to self-advocate, which becomes important in an educational setting when they have to ask questions or get extra help. There are certain emotional properties that adults take for granted, she said, and the pandemic showed us how harmful it can be when students lack the social setting to develop them. Because of this, Quinto-MacCallum argued that SEL is vital in raising metrics district-wide.
The district is also in the process of incorporating the community schools model. While SEL looks at the student’s social and emotional needs, the community schools model helps create programming that bring families and other community partners together to ensure student needs are being met in and out of the classroom. According to Victoria Santistevan, the community schools coordinator for the district, the model is “critical” in the wake of the pandemic.
“Community schools were developed with the understanding that every community is different and recognizing that education is a shared responsibility,” Santistevan said. “It’s not just the district. It’s shared throughout the community. We ensure that families, students and community members have a say in deciding what will work best for student success. Because learning never happens in isolation.”
Like SEL, community schools attempt to address elements of education that were lost during the isolation of the pandemic. The entire idea behind community schools is that a student’s base needs — hygiene, shelter, educational infrastructure such as access to critical modern resources like Wi-Fi — are prerequisites for a fruitful education.
Mondragon said educators and administrators district-wide worked hard to improve its NMVistas scores from 2022 to 2023, but that SEL and the community schools model will be important as the district continues to improve student outcomes.
However, administrators recognize that each school in the district will need to be addressed individually to ensure the district sees overall improvement, which is no easy task with roughly 2,000 students.
“Whatever Enos needs isn’t necessarily what Arroyos needs, or what Ranchos needs,” Mondragon said. “They all have very unique needs, but it’s helpful when we have administrators who have been at all of the school sites and have an understanding of what is needed there and continue to have those conversations with principals and teachers. I think that the challenge is that we are big, but the good thing is that I have administrators now who know each school site.”
“It’s been hard for students to re-socialize with their peers. When it comes to our extracurricular activities, it’s been a little bit harder to draw our students back in because they’re wanting to go home and isolate themselves more than what we had normally seen. This is just my observation. We used to have these huge, huge waiting lists for after-school programs, and now it’s dropped from what it used to be.”
Taos Schools Interim Superintendent Renetta Mondragon