Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham recently signed a bill supporting community schools. The idea is simple. Children can’t focus on academics if they’re hungry or dealing with trauma. So a community school offers wrap-around services, like counseling and a food pantry. There’s been a push to expand the model across New Mexico - including in Las Cruces, which is already home to one community school.
Phynix Drake’s daughter, Mackenzie, was an eighth grader at Lynn Middle School when teachers noticed something was off.
“My daughter was falling asleep in class a lot and she was always tired,” Drake says. “And they finally asked her, they were like ‘what’s going on?’ And she told them ‘well, it’s because it was really cold in the car last night.’ And they were like, ‘what do you mean?’”
Drake and her daughter had recently become homeless. They got evicted after a friend stole Drake’s rent money. Now, they were living out of a car while Drake held down a job at a call center.
“I was saving up and trying to find my own place,” she says. “It was just hard because every meal we ate was out, we didn’t have anywhere to cook. I would drive my daughter to the truck stop in Vado so they could take showers and wash up for the morning, to come to school. So it was really tiring.”
Once the school found out what was going on, the principal called Drake and asked her to come in right away.
“I was really afraid that my daughter was going to be taken away from me,” Drake says. “My greatest fear was that she’d end up in foster care or somewhere where someone was gonna mistreat her or do something and I wouldn’t be there to protect her.”
But that’s not what happened. Instead, the principal offered to help Drake get back on her feet. She told her about some of the services Lynn offers families, like a monthly food pantry and access to a washer and dryer. And shel connected Drake with a housing non-profit, which found her an apartment.
“We went from being homeless to having our own place,” Drake says. “They helped lift me back up.”
Lynn is a community school -- the first one in Las Cruces. The idea is simple: students can’t learn if their basic needs aren’t met. So the school helps meet those needs, by supporting students and their families.
“It’s trying to take away those barriers to learning and give them what they need to be healthy and safe and their basic needs taken care of so they can focus on instruction,” says principal Brenda Ballard.
She says it’s hard to concentrate if you’re hungry or have a bad toothache. So Lynn partners with local non-profits, businesses and government agencies to bring much-needed services to the school. Roadrunner Food Bank hosts the monthly food pantry. Ben Archer Health Center provides mental healthcare. Doña Ana Community College started up a dental clinic inside the school, with $30,000 worth of equipment, courtesy of Delta Dental.
Elmer Gonzalez directs the Dental Hygiene Program at DACC. He says Lynn was a great fit for the first school-based dental clinic. It’s considered a 100% free and reduced lunch school, an indicator of poverty.
“We want to provide services to children who have no insurance, who have limited access to dental healthcare, and we want to provide the services on-site because that’s gonna allow the kids not to miss so much school,” Gonzales says. Plus, parents don’t have to miss work or worry about transportation.
Silvia Chavez is the Community Administrator at Lynn. She digs through a closet in the school’s community room, a bright space with a healthy snack bar and racks of donated clothing, free for the taking. There are drawers full of free sanitary pads, and baskets with shampoo bottles.
Chavez’s job is essentially to coordinate all these community partnerships. Having a dedicated staff person to do this work is one of the things that sets a community school like Lynn apart from more traditional schools.
“I mean, you can walk into any school and there might be a parent room, there might be a place where parents can learn English,” Chavez says. “So it doesn’t look that much different. The difference is that I’m here to support that and support the staff as well, so that they’re not doing all the work. I am here to do the running around, the hunting, the listening.”
The district funds Chavez’s position. But otherwise, it doesn’t pay for these additional services; the time and supplies come out of partner organization’s budgets.
NEA’s Mary Parr Sanchez is the Community Schools Liaison for Las Cruces Public Schools. “It isn’t an added cost, really, for the school,” she says. One study in Albuquerque, which has more than 20 community schools, found that for every dollar spent on a coordinator like Chavez, there was a seven dollar return on investment, because of all the services that were brought in.
Sanchez helped bring the community school model to Las Cruces. She said Lynn made sense as a pilot, not just because of its demographics, but because of the location.
“Number one for a real community school it needed to be a real walking school where there were neighborhoods around it,” she says. “So that puts out several of our middle schools because most kids get bused in. But at Lynn there is a rich vibrant community that surrounds it.”
Sanchez says in just two years, Lynn has already seen a boost in attendance rates and a drop in out-of-school suspensions.
Now, she’s working to transform more schools. The City of Las Cruces and Las Cruces Public Schools are forming a joint board to expand the model. Mayor Ken Miyagishima says the city may approve up to $70,000 in annual funding to support the effort. The goal is to expand to three or four new schools next year.
For her part, parent Phynix Drake would love to see more community schools. She says she hadn’t been living in Las Cruces for very long, when the school stepped in to offer help.
“They made me feel like I had grown up here, like I had been living here my whole life,” she says. “Like, ‘you’re one of us and we need to take care of you.’ So it helped us to open up and be real about our situation and tell them exactly what we needed help in. Because we’re the kind of people that we don’t ask for help, we just figure it out. And when we understood that the school was really trying to help us, we felt comfortable enough to be honest and we were able to receive that help.”
