Tours of museums and a historic mine, a night at the opera in Santa Fe, relaxing poolside in Pojoaque — sounds like a vacation in Northern New Mexico, right?
Wrong. It’s summer school.
During the month of July, Mountain View Elementary School in Cordova is hosting one of the area’s most extensive summer school endeavors, ever. More than 60 students signed up for the month-long program that includes science in the morning and arts in the afternoon, with field trips dispersed generously throughout the curriculum to keep the young minds engaged.
The program is affiliated with the nonprofit Truchas Services Center, which manages a year-round pre-school and library as well.
Recently, Patricia Tafoya, the staff librarian at the school and art coordinator for the summer program chaperoned some students on a late-night trip to the Santa Fe Opera to see the romantic comedy “The Last Savage.”
“Oh, they loved it,” she said.
And those types of activities have local students from Truchas, Ojo Sarco, Chimayó and Cordova excited to participate. Tafoya joked about the number of youths who signed up for the summer in comparison with those enrolled at the elementary school during the year.
“Sixty-four registered students — that’s more than normal school year enrollment,” she said. “We only had 52 during the year.”
She said at any given time on any given day many children do not attend, but the interest is still impressive.
July 15, a Friday in the school gymnasium where the afternoon art classes are held, showed it. Under the supervision of local artisans, students made wooden birdhouses, dream-catchers and bead work. Another local artist measured the arm-spans of the children to tailor them with proper-fitting, artificial bird wings to be worn at a fiesta parade, which will mark the end of the summer program.
“I think it’s wonderful,” said Dulcie Romero, an artisan from Truchas. “It keeps them busy and teaches them art.”
She was helping students to craft farolitos and night-light covers by pounding holes into sheet-tin.
As the afternoon wound down, a little bit of focus was lost. Toddlers ran around while their parents, there to pick up their children, ate snow cones at the cafeteria tables. Girls sat on the bleachers and talked and some boys wrestled in the corner until they were scolded to behave.
But for Program Director Mary Singleton, the packed gym on the outskirts of Cordova was not a surprise.
“The summer program is important because there’s nothing up here for kids,” she said. “There’s no movie theater around the corner, no swimming pool, not even a park.”
While the afternoon is a little more open, Singleton had to restrict the morning science program to kindergarten through sixth grade to maintain focus in the classroom. She said science is one of the subject matters lacking most in the curricula of the region’s schools.
“Truchas is all about art,” she said. “But introducing this much science is a new thing.”
And the students are getting a crash course. Just as the art instruction is led by professional artists from the region, the science component is led by actual scientists. Singleton is a retired chemist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and managed the plutonium facility there.
Singleton said although at times it can be more difficult managing children than plutonium, in terms of science, the younger the better. Younger audiences are better at coping with abstract ideas like the structure of an atom or molecule.
“They don’t have set ideas about, ‘I can’t see it so it’s not there,’” Singleton said. “We need to plant the seeds now.”
The science classroom, a world apart from the large free-form gym, contains calculated growing experiments with crystals and plants, microscopes, dissected owl pellets and an earthworm farm for making compost. Science kits sit in the corner and rock samples await analysis by students wielding florescent lights and radiation meters.
But the most exciting science takes place out in the field. The youths participated in a national bird survey, recording population levels and species types in their own backyard to submit as part of a larger database. They also collected water samples for a worldwide study, and many of the rocks in the classroom are ones they collected on their trip to the mines.
“Some of them just eat it up,” Singleton said.
At the mines, students scampered about peering down old mine shafts, collecting rocks and thrusting them into the face of their tour guide, Gilbert Griego, of Dixon.
“What’s this one?” they chimed in chorus, surrounding him.
He went down the line enumerating the different types — calcite, schist, quartz — before the children labeled them and plopped them into their rock collection bags. There is a five-pound carry-out limit in place, set to preserve the unique geology of the mines and their surrounding landscape. Griego said there is only one other mine comparable to it in the world, located in India.
Eleven-year-old Joshua Velarde, from Chimayó, holding up his collection bag, declared he wanted to reach the maximum poundage he could lawfully take with him.
“It’s pretty cool,” he said, although after a long day hiking and collecting rocks in the desert sun, Velarde admitted his favorite field trip was to the pool.
Helping to guide that trip was Brenda Kuiper, who holds a doctorate in chemistry from Cornell University. She is better known around the program as “Dr. K” and helps Singleton along with another teacher to coordinate the summer science program, giving instruction in every scientific subject from chemistry to physiology and recycling.
She previously did educational outreach to eighth-graders through her job at Northern New Mexico College but she liked the fascination with the subject the younger group shows.
“Their eyes just light up when you show them something,” she said, acknowledging the students were still children and the program is a mixture of learning and summer adventure. “We fill them with useful knowledge and then they go play.”
Yet for how many more summers, if any, will the children of those communities experience that curious glow of amazement and summer days of broadened horizons? Despite all the excitement and participation in the program, the first-time endeavor sits in a precarious position.
“We start from scratch next year,” Singleton said.
This summer was unique. The arrangement was funded by a one-time influx of donations, mostly private. The Center received gifts of more than $18,000 from the Presbyterian Church, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation and a private individual from Santa Fe.
The available money allowed for the previously volunteer-based summer program in Truchas, which has been in operation for a few years, to expand. It hired staff like Kuiper, funded the field trips and could pay the wages of the local artisans to give workshops and high school-aged program assistants to help oversee the children.
The expansion was also made possible by coordinating with a summer program in Cordova that lost its legislative funding several years ago. Tafoya was one of the organizers of the Cordova program and applauded the new joint venture.
“We work well together,” Tafoya said. “It took a team to make it successful. I’m dying to do it again next year, if the money is there.”
However that is a big if. The primary fundraiser, 75-year-old Singleton, is not sure she’s up for another year of grant writing, solicitations for private donations and sacrificing quality time with her grandchildren in California to coordinate the school.
Furthermore, Singleton donates all her time and said replacing her with a paid director may prove costly as well, further straining the already tight budget of the summer school.
“I’ve got real conflicting issues,” she said. “I don’t think I have the energy to do it next year. But every year I say I’m not going to do it, and then it gets bigger.”