The Alvord School Project
Here's the backgound - click on Sam's News at left for the update!
Alvord Elementary School is one of the ‘downtown’ schools in Santa Fe. These schools were mostly built 50 to 75 years ago, when Santa Fe was a small town located around the historic Plaza. As the city has become a haven for retirees and second home owners, the demographics of the desirable downtown area have shifted.
Fewer and fewer families with children can afford to live in this area because property values have soared and neighborhoods have gentrified. These shifting demographics have forced the school board to consider the closure of Alvord.
We want to keep Alvord open and help it thrive. We see schools as critical ‘anchor points’ in neighborhoods, not only for kids and families, but also as life long learning centers. We believe schools must work with, and sometimes co-locate with, other service providers for children and families to build stronger and healthier communities.
We think schools should also be the focus of the before and after school programs that we know are critical to the educational and life success of young people. (Whether they deliver them or only house them because the kids and parents are already there.) We are beginning discussions with advocates for ‘birth to three’ children and ‘pre through K’ groups along with youth and teen groups to promote an integrated model for caring for and educating our young people. By creating an excellent after school program, kids can remain inspire, enthused, and nurtured, and parents can join them to share the early evenings activities.
Because we know that keeping kids interested and involved helps keep them in school and that keeping them in school helps keep them out of trouble, we are also working to find ways to integrate positive interventions with juvenal justice programs.
Our immediate goal is to help keep Alvord open by converting it to a magnet school based on a theme of ecology and sustainability. We believe that will be a draw not only to local families, but also to families and students outside the ‘walk zone’ surrounding the school. There are thousands of state, city and private employees working with a mile of Alvord, and we hope to draw on them, too.
We are working with Santa Fe Public Schools to develop a detailed plan showing what the steps are, who will undertake them, what the costs will be, what the deadlines are and how we'll assess progress. We will also help develop ecology and sustainability based curricula, hopefully in the process using the ‘community as the classroom’ with partners such as the Sierra Club, River Source and Audubon.
A supporting goal is to help create a pilot transformative education model that can engage our kids cognitively and emotionally, and help keep them in school. We've proposed that Alvord ultimately go to a Pre - 8 model, incorporating best practices at all levels – hopefully by adding a 7th grade at parents' request after the model proves itself in the first year, and adding an 8th grade the following year. We're proposing partnerships with higher education groups such as Highlands University, College of Santa Fe and the University of New Mexico to undertake an assessment process so we collect good data on the success of the model, with an eye toward both publishing the results and making sure it's transferable to schools beyond Alvord.
As the school grows and draws in more families and services to support those families, we envision the transformation of the neighborhood to a mixed use, mixed income area, with higher density and greater affordability. We expect new development and upgrades will use ‘best practices’ for water, energy and other resources, often with students helping plan this work. This long range plan, models a mutually beneficial sustainable, more affordable, safe, friendly pedestrian lifestyle.
We believe that turning Alvord into a ecology and sustainability theme magnet school can help the school district attract and retain students and significantly enhance academic performance. It can be part of a larger effort to improve the health and wellbeing of children and families. It can help the City of Santa Fe boost its tax base without a significant increase in infrastructure costs. It can reduce crime and enhance security. And it can serve as a model and an inspiration for other schools, other neighborhoods and other communities to go sustainable in the truest sense of the word. By using a sustainable lifestyle as the basis for the curriculum, students of all ages, see their efforts not only healing the planet, but creating real jobs in the emerging sustainable economy, at the same time as building a bigger base of workforce housing.
In the longer run, we believe Alvord can be the catalyst for neighborhood renewal, as families move back into the area so their kids can be close to school and the parents can be close to work. We can see the success of the program becoming such that the school will need to be enlarged, and that in its redesign, it will become a showpiece of green building and sustainable practices. We fully expect the students to be deeply involved in the process of redesigning the school, and hopefully, transferring what they learn to redesigning the neighborhood. (For a look at visions of what the school could become and how the process might unfold, see A Sustainable Way of Life Becomes the Curriculum.)
Our ultimate goal is to help create the necessary processes, enabling legislation and infrastructure to support neighborhoods to re-envision and redesign themselves to be economically, ecologically and socially sustainable. We're working on creating a larger coalition of for-profit, non-profit, government and community groups to do this with an eye to better serving all of their needs and mission statements through working systemically. We think sustainable neighborhoods can go a long way toward solving many of the most pressing issues we face and serve as an ideal incubator for further community building and innovation.
