“I was burning myself out with the commute; I was burning myself out trying to keep up with everything,” he said.

This school year, Skinner, a senior, became one of 39 students housed at New Mexico School for the Arts’ five-day-a-week dormitories, currently leased at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Retreat Center on the east side of town. The change was a welcome one, Skinner said; he enjoys the high-energy community of the dorms, and living in Santa Fe gave him the extra time to run for and lead the student council.

In a few months, Skinner and his fellow residential students will move even closer to campus: New Mexico School for the Arts’ new dorm facility, which has been under construction on the school’s Railyard-adjacent campus for about a year, is scheduled to welcome students in January.

“I’m very excited that it’s new, purpose-built [and increases] capacity, and having our students on campus is going to be so valuable in terms of having our students who are coming from outside of the area feeling really integrated into the program in an even deeper way,” said Head of School Eric Crites.

A state-chartered high school with more than 300 enrollees, New Mexico School for the Arts admits students from across the state to participate in its arts education — with specialties in creative writing, dance, music, theater and visual arts — as well as traditional academic curricula.

By all accounts, it’s a good school. It’s among the Public Education Department’s latest batch of “Spotlight” schools. Data released by the agency last week shows New Mexico School for the Arts’ four-year graduation rate for the 2021-22 school year is over 95%, compared with 76% statewide. It’s been named a U.S. Department of Education Blue Ribbon School and a School That Works by Edutopia, a nonprofit that compiles best practices in education.

But like many charter schools, it had trouble finding a facility that met its needs. The school opened in 2010 at the former St. Francis Cathedral School at the corner of East Alameda Street and Paseo de Peralta. Then, it considered moving to the St. Catherine Indian School campus and a plot of land on Siringo Road before the New Mexico School for the Arts Art Institute, a private foundation that raises funds to support the high school, purchased three buildings including and surrounding Sanbusco Market Center in 2015.

After a $30 million renovation, the former shopping center and surrounding buildings became a cohesive arts school, complete with administrative offices, classrooms, studios and science lab spaces.

Because the school accepts students from across the state, though, finding housing for students in Santa Fe posed an additional challenge. That’s why the school leased housing from the retreat center, providing students whose home addresses are at least 65 miles from campus or are experiencing extenuating circumstances housing and a bus to and from school each day.

The new dorms will hold up to 60 students in double-occupancy rooms, and include common areas and workout spaces. It’ll be the new home of the school’s five-day-a-week residential program, which offers nightly social programming and helps teenagers adapt to semi-independent living, said Residential Director Isabella Aldana.

Crites said students provided significant input during the dorm design process, offering their opinions on everything from the layout of bathrooms to the color scheme, which — per students’ choice — is based on the bright hues of a Frida Kahlo painting.

The project was paid for by state capital outlay funding, said Cindy Montoya, president of the school’s Art Institute. Documents from the Legislature show the state provided nearly $3.8 million in funding for the dorm construction project during the 2022 legislative session and an additional $685,000 this year.

Current dorm students said they’re excited to move into on-campus accommodations.

Freshman Sophie Dorn of Magdalena took a break from a cinematic miming exercise Thursday afternoon — during which she and a group of fellow students were working to act out the entirety of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in just 15 minutes — to describe her dorm experience: It feels like “one big sleepover.”

She said she’s excited to keep participating in the dorms’ social activities, while living closer to school.

During creative writing class Thursday, senior Gabriel Duarte, a student from Roswell, agreed; he said the dorm experience helped him become more social. On-campus dorms, he said, will help him maintain that progress while exploring Santa Fe and working out more.

As he stretched canvas across a wooden frame, senior Jay Myers said staying on campus will offer him better access to school events and greater Santa Fe.

His only concern about the move to the new dorms, he said, is maintaining a healthy school-life balance while he literally lives at school.

Myers has one of the longer commutes to New Mexico School for the Arts’ campus. He travels from his home in Silver City to Santa Fe every other weekend via small commuter jet — an “immense privilege,” he said — and stays with friends closer to Santa Fe on the other weekends.

The school’s next step is to secure recurring funding to provide students like Myers with a seven-day-a-week dorm program, allowing them to stay on campus during the weekend. Those long and expensive drives, train rides or flights back home, Crites said, are “a barrier to more students from the farthest distances around the state [attending].”

Skinner said he can’t wait to live in the new dorm space and enjoy the social atmosphere, extra time in his schedule and short walk to downtown Santa Fe and his after-school job.

“I really love it there,” Skinner said of his experience in the dorms. “I think that we have a very unique opportunity as a school to allow kids like me who come from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and extenuating circumstances and rural parts of New Mexico to come here and engage with the arts.”