APS school board President Yolanda Montoya-Cordova reflects on the challenges and joys of the job

Editor’s note: This continues a series of Journal “exit interviews” with outgoing Albuquerque Public Schools board members.

It was Sept. 7, 2022, the first full meeting of the Albuquerque Public Schools board after the panel approved a district’s contract with its educators, ending a weeklong dispute with the local teachers union that shook the faith of many teachers across the district.

Board President Yolanda Montoya-Cordova was giving her report, which can be used for community updates, announcements or other purposes.

But Montoya-Cordova was using that time, in part, to rally the troops.

“This is the hardest volunteer job I’ve ever done,” she told her fellow board members. “We volunteer a lot of our time to do this, and we’re doing this out of service. But we have to remember that we’re in service of others. And we’re in service of the communities that we represent.”

School board members are paid very little for the work they do, receiving per diems that don’t crack triple digits even for board meetings over four hours.

But the job isn’t just showing up for meetings. It can be reviewing hundreds of pages of documents ahead of meetings, responding to dozens of people voicing concerns or asking for help about issues facing their districts and countless other community commitments.

Then, after all of that, that school board member represents just one voice on the panel, a stark reality for almost all new members on the panel, Montoya-Cordova told the Journal, reflecting on her six years with the board ahead of her final meeting that took place on Dec. 20.

“You come in, and you believe you have the ability to change everything — and you don’t,” she said. “It’s that schooling … that you get, and you say, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I’m just one person with seven other people. And this is complex. This is a very big job.’

“The journey is really about understanding that you’re just one of seven,” she added.

Montoya-Cordova didn’t come on the board the way most others do.

In 2017, a vacancy opened up on the school board. Montoya-Cordova, who was working in state government at the time, thought to herself, “I could do that.”

So she tossed her hat in the ring and was quickly appointed to the board.

“It was on a whim,” she said. “It wasn’t like everybody else who’s really made a thoughtful decision about running.”

But before long, Montoya-Cordova and the school board would find themselves tackling some of the district’s biggest issues, ranging from a search for a new superintendent to ongoing budget cuts.

The COVID-19 pandemic, though, was the lowest point for “any board member across the country,” Montoya-Cordova said, including her.

Contrary to the opinion of fellow outgoing board member Barbara Petersen, Montoya-Cordova said she wasn’t proud of how the APS school board comported itself during that emergency.

“I think we could have handled ourselves a whole lot better,” she said. “I think we were trying to do real time decision making right on the dais when we could have been much more prepared ahead of time.”

There were still programs Montoya-Cordova said she was proud to see grow during her tenure on the board. The one that stands out the most to her is the district’s program for earning bilingual seals, distinctions students can get on their high school diplomas by completing a dual language program .

In the 2016-2017 school year, 191 students received bilingual seals on their diplomas across APS, according to data provided by the district. Last school year, that number was up to 1,392.

The number of schools providing the bilingual seal program has also skyrocketed — from eight in 2016-2017 to 42 this school year, according to APS.

“It is one of the programs that has had a consistent track record of just really moving up,” Montoya-Cordova said, noting that she’s had personal experience in the benefits it provides, with her late husband’s granddaughter receiving a bilingual seal.

“(She) is doing amazing things, and I believe her biliteracy helped her do those amazing things,” Montoya-Cordova said.

Montoya-Cordova is also from the South Valley, which she ultimately would represent — somethng Rio Grande High School principal Antoinette Valenzuela doesn’t take for granted.

“What she was given from the community growing up, she gave back to the community, as our board member,” Valenzuela said.

Beyond the board

After years of pandemic crisis management, helping overhaul how the board governs APS and leading the panel through meetings, Montoya-Cordova is now free and clear.

And to some extent, she relishes that fact.

“You all have to read something tomorrow. I don’t,” she teased her fellow board members during her final meeting.

Though her term is up, Montoya-Cordova insists she plans to be involved in the state school boards association and other education-related work.

But she does plan to have time to do some of the things that are important to her — visiting her daughter and grandchildren out of town, caring for her mother, reading books that aren’t about education — and, if she sticks with it, learning the accordion.

That all being said, Montoya-Cordova said leaving the board is still bittersweet.

“Just as it was getting a lot of fun, I’m not going to be part of it anymore,” she said.