Albuquerque Public Schools seeks community input on career academies initiative

Albuquerque Public Schools packed one of its training complexes Tuesday morning as the largest district in New Mexico looks to grow a new initiative and seeks community input to help guide coming decisions on its rollout and implementation.

The “Academies of Albuquerque” was launched this year at three high schools — Cibola, Highland and Manzano — as a framework to help students determine what career field they’re interested in and provide professional training before they enter college or the workforce.

Superintendent Gabriella Blakey told the Journal on Tuesday that the district hopes to expand the program to all high schools in the next four years.

“I think some of the early responses we’ve seen is students feeling connected to an adult at school, the other students at school,” she said. “I think in working that community with our students as freshmen entering, which is where we usually see students kind of start to check out, has really started to give us some early results that students feel an increased sense of belonging and purpose in school.”

The district has partnered with the local chapter of the United Way, which is seeking donors to raise $500,000 over the next five years to subsidize the initiative.

“The community is really coming together to support our work with our students. I think it’s very important that we see it as a community, and not as schools versus the community,” Blakey said. “I think that partnership is really important to move work forward. In general, I always talk about how I want our students to have a sense of pride in how the community talks about them.”

She said that not many concerns have come out of the three schools where the program launched, but the district is working out the kinks.

However, teachers have not received much instruction about what the goals of the academies are and how curriculum should be tailored, according to Derek Villanueva, a social studies teacher and union representative for Manzano High School.

“Teachers are racking their brains trying to figure out what this academy thing is,” he said. “They think there’s a lot of potential, but they’re starting to be a little bit disenchanted with it.”

Villanueva’s concerns were echoed by Sean Thomas, executive vice president of the teacher’s union and a teacher at Eldorado High School.

“I’m coming from a school that’s just down the street from Manzano, and they’re saying we’re going to this academy model starting next year,” Thomas said. “Nobody knows what this means, nobody knows what it’s built around, nobody knows what the goals of it are. We can’t even really backwards plan, because we don’t know what the ultimate aim is.”

Those in attendance at the Berna Facio Professional Development Center in the Northeast Heights included stakeholders in the business community, parents, students and district staff. United Way counted 245 attendees.

In addition to activities where they got to discuss what career paths they wanted to see provided at the academies, attendees heard from a number of speakers, including APS leadership, United Way members, the county manager and Mayor Tim Keller.

Keller spoke about the city’s issue with attracting companies and expressed a hope that APS’ academies program could change that.

“Our biggest challenge when companies move here — or when they want to come here — is workforce,” Keller said. “It’s just actually really deep and structural, and it’s really, really hard to fix.”

The focus on workforce development from Keller and other speakers did not sit well with all in attendance — particularly, teachers’ union members.

“If the ultimate aim is what they said today in this meeting, I have problems with it, because basically everything was about producing workers, producing workers, producing workers,” Thomas said. “Education is a much more holistic process than that.”

Longtime president of the teachers’ union, Ellen Bernstein, also expressed optimism that the initiative could engage students in learning and hoped that the district’s goal wasn’t centered around the workforce.

“We are choosing to trust that the administration of APS understands that this isn’t an effort to produce workers,” she said. “It’s an effort to make sure that our education is student-centered, that students have a chance to explore their own interests and apply what they’re learning in a variety of ways.”