Robert Nott | The New Mexican
The New Mexico School for the Arts has earned a reputation for its creative programming — a curriculum centered on theater, dance, music and visual arts — designed to foster and develop the talents of high school students from across the state.
But alongside the school’s Famelike foundation, its academic instructors have worked equally hard to ensure that students are just as skilled in math, reading, writing, history, science, Spanish and other core classes. Those efforts appear to be paying off for the arts school, which serves about 220 students in ninth through 12th grade.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education paid the statechartered school one of its highest tributes, classifying it as a Blue Ribbon School — one of only three in New Mexico this year and Santa Fe’s first since the Blue Ribbon program began more than three decades ago.
The national nod is given to schools that make significant progress in closing academic achievement gaps. Among the initiatives to make that happen at the New Mexico School for the Arts are 35-minute intervention classes in math and English language arts, and an interdisciplinary approach, in which knowledge and skills that students learn in their core classes are applied to their arts training and vice versa.
“When we started the school seven years ago, we had a goal … to reach national recognition within ten years,” history teacher Roxanne Seagraves said Wednesday. “It’s exciting to meet that kind of goal and realize that as a family working together, we have shared that common vision.”
“Through the arts, we engage our students, but also through the arts we can cross-pollinate and get them equally engaged in academics,” said Head of School Cindy Montoya. “One informs the other.” Almost all of the school’s graduates have been accepted to the colleges of their choice over the years, though just over half of them pursue a degree or career in the arts, Montoya said.
“That’s part of the mission of this school,” she said. “Finding out who you are, what you want to do, what you are going to be in life.”
That includes graduating students who want to be teachers, chemists, engineers and so on, she and other teachers said.
Montoya announced the news to the entire school Wednesday afternoon. The students’ pride and excitement accompanied them from class to class, discipline to discipline.
In a music study room, senior Sam Barrett set aside his cello for a moment to consider the honor. He said he wasn’t surprised by the Blue Ribbon award. “You put together a bunch of people who are passionate about the arts, and they probably have just as sharp skills in the academic field,” he said.
Sitting at a nearby piano, junior Santana Garcia-Alarid said she encounters students from other schools who don’t comprehend the New Mexico School for the Arts’ academic side. “It’s hard for some other kids to grasp that we focus on academics as much as the arts,” she said. “They think it’s all about our passion and not education.”
But, she said, the students are also passionate about their education.
Montoya said state Public Education Secretary Hanna Skandera nominated the school for the Blue Ribbon status.
The Public Education Department has recognized the school’s success in its own 5-year-old
A-through-F grading system. It recently awarded the school its fourth A in as many years.
Two other New Mexico schools — Cloudcroft Middle School in Cloudcroft and Mesa Elementary School in Clovis — also earned Blue Ribbon status this year.
“These Blue Ribbon schools are leading the way for New Mexico, and are showing the heights that our students and schools can reach,” Skandera said in a news release. “These are just some of the top schools in New Mexico, but they represent what our state can achieve when we put students first and challenge our kids to aim higher.”
The Legislature approved a charter for the New Mexico School for the Arts, now located at the site of the former St. Francis Cathedral School on East Alameda Street, to open in 2010. Unlike most charter schools, which rely on a luckofthedraw lottery system for enrollment, students at the arts school have to audition or submit a portfolio for acceptance.
The school currently serves high school students from more than 30 communities around the state, Montoya said. It plans to relocate to the Sanbusco Market Center in the Railyard within a few years so it can expand its enrollment and programs.
The U.S. Department of Education awarded the Blue Ribbon to 329 schools around the country this year. It has bestowed the honor on about 8,500 public and private schools since it initiated the program in 1982.
Montoya will join Principal Eric Crites and Arts Coordinator Joey Chavez at a two-day awards ceremony in early November in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the school’s achievement, and the school will fly its Blue Ribbon flag on campus.