It’ll be a few years before we know how well we’ve done in choosing Joel Boyd as our new school superintendent. Judging by the district he came from, and the people on his transition team, he seems to belong to the new generation of school reformers—a bold class of data-driven leaders who use good business practices to transform school systems into sleek, well-run learning machines.

It’s sacred coffee time on the patio, that time of day when silence is supposed to reign. I pay attention to the slow migration of the sun each day—it has begun rising each morning just a tiny bit further to the south—and watch the birds settle into the day’s routine.

I’m at the Aztec, which isn’t actually newsworthy, because I’m here every week—be it for the kale salad, the loose-leaf yerba mate or the free wi-fi (OK, and the free wi-fi). But I’m not here to milk a single glass of South American tea while rewriting my website; I’m here for the Starseed.

For this year's Best of Santa Fe issue, columnist Seth Biderman offers three of the best options for reforming Santa Fe Public Schools.

A few years ago, I stopped reporting on Los Alamos National Laboratory. I was no longer confident in my ability to remain objective when writing about the nuclear weapons facility. There’s no way I can pretend that the development and manufacture of nuclear weapons is a good idea, no matter where it’s done. And I’ve interviewed too many people whose stories turned my stomach.

Too old for Rock Camp. Too lame for Guitar Workshop. Not talented, invited or naked enough to join The Sticky. My chances of making music with others are looking imaginary, at best, which makes sense given that I can’t play any of my guitars—bass, acoustic, classical or electric—at all.

In the banter about how to improve education, you don’t hear much about homeschooling. Though it’s on the rise nationally, with three support groups in Santa Fe (including the Santa Fe Homeschool Association, with over 200 families), home schooling is often dismissed as a fringe practice of the religious and the radical, an economic impossibility, a sure path to geekdom for the kids. Common wisdom holds that parents should help with homework and Halloween fairs, but schooling in the post-industrial age is a high-stakes, complex affair, best left to officials and pedagogues.

Environmental news is a downer. I know. Despite trying to balance news about climate change and energy development with a love for wild places and muddy rivers, I’ve pretty much spent a decade of my life depressing readers. Lately, I’ve even been wondering how much I’ve contributed to the helplessness people feel about the environment.

A ghost haunts the river near my house. She wears a long black dress with a high collar (think Viktor & Rolf, only dusty, tattered and blood-stained), and cries at night. Some say she cries because she misses the kids she drowned in the river. Others claim she’s heartbroken over the military dude who refused to marry her because she was a dirty tramp who’d borne illegitimate children, which was what inspired her to off them just before she stabbed herself in the chest with a pair of scissors. They call her La Llorona (The Crying Woman), and—as legend has it—if she touches you, you instantly disappear. Freaky though it sounds, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe her ghostly finger is a portal to the ocean, the Louvre, or a Reykjavik hot spring.

On May 15, Gov. Susana Martinez issued a formal drought declaration for New Mexico. According to the National Weather Service, 2011 was the second driest year on record. The entire state experienced decreased moisture levels, and 90 percent of it suffered severe drought conditions.