Santa Fe New Mexican — New Mexico School for the Arts seeks to buy state-owned parcel on Siringo for new campus
Posted: Thursday, October 23, 2014 7:00 pm | Updated: 12:22 am, Fri Oct 24, 2014.
The state-chartered New Mexico School for the Arts is still looking for a large permanent home in Santa Fe to accommodate between 300 and 400 students — and it has set its sights on vacant state land on Siringo Road adjacent to the new Higher Education Center.
School administrators and board members asked for the support of the Capitol Building Planning Commission on Wednesday morning in the Roundhouse as they expressed their needs.
“We need a lot of room,” said Riis Gonzales, director of the art school’s Art Institute, a private foundation that raises funds to support the high school, which opened with a state charter in 2010 in the former St. Francis Cathedral School building downtown. About 200 students in grades 9-12 attend the school, which offers an equal amount of training in arts and academics.
Gonzales said the school needs about 100,000 square feet to eventually accommodate up to 400 students and offer them training in appropriate dance and art studios and a theater. School leaders also want to build dorms for students who live in other parts of the state. The students who attend the school now come from 19 different counties, and more than 20 of them board in a downtown bed-and-breakfast at the school’s expense.
Edward Burkle, co-chairman of the committee and Cabinet secretary of the General Services Department, which oversees state land, told the assembly that the department has no plans for the 11-acre site on Siringo Road and is willing to sell it.
Gonzales said the Art Institute already has raised $7 million in private funds toward purchasing the property and building a school. The school recently had the property appraised at about $1.4 million.
Suzanne Barker Kalangis, special adviser to the school, said construction of the new campus would cost $20 million to $30 million.
Committee member Rep. Tom Taylor, a Farmington Republican, said he sees the land sale as an investment in an educational experiment in which students can express their artistic side as they learn. “That’s something you can’t find,” he said, adding that most schools “deprive kids of the chance to be creative.”
The school receives about $1.7 million of its annual $3.3 million budget from the State Equalization Guarantee per-pupil funding formula. The Art Institute raises the other $1.6 million.
Students must audition, rather than go through a lottery process, to gain admittance to the school.
Gonzales said in order to acquire the state land, the school has to earn the support of both the state House of Representatives and the Senate in the form of a joint resolution during the next legislative session, which begins in mid-January.
The school’s charter requires it to build any new campus on public land.
Contact Robert Nott at 986-3021 or rnott@sfnewmexican.com.