By the time Santa Fe public middle schools enroll some of their incoming students, it’s already too late, De Vargas Middle School Principal Diane Garcia-Piro tells SFR. In the seventh grade, many of them are still working at a third-grade level.

At lunchtime, Jonathan Brannon played basketball with De Vargas Middle School students in the school gym. At a school dance, he joined in and busted out his breakdancing moves. At a De Vargas fundraiser, he volunteered to take a pie in the face to raise money for hurricane victims. But that charisma and enthusiasm didn’t earn Brannon praise from leadership at Santa Fe Public Schools. Instead, it got him transferred to a less challenging position at an elementary school.

Los Alamos National Laboratory is trumpeting a new radioactive waste cleanup agreement that would allow it to leave half of its radioactive waste in place indefinitely—and defy federal environmental protection guidelines.

Each spring, homeowners in Calaveras County, Calif., can be seen outside their mountain cabins engaging in a familiar ritual: raking up masses of pine needles and stuffing them into yard-clipping disposal bins.

Butter-deprived Norwegians turn to Country Crock, Russian dairy mafia

On a late June afternoon, 18 mile-per-hour winds whistle across an open meadow on a small piece of private land in the Jemez Mountains. In the saddle between two pine-covered ridges at the edge of the property, an aspen tree teeters over onto the bare wire of an electrical pole, causing a spark. Over the next 14 hours, the resulting fire burns 43,000 acres, or one acre every 1.17 seconds. It devours areas the size of a football field in (literally) two seconds. In a little over a month, it has spread through 156,000 acres and incinerated 63 homes.

Five years ago, the Teen Parent Center at Santa Fe High School got a call from a local obstetrician. He was referring a patient—a girl who had dropped out of seventh grade after becoming pregnant—for the center’s services.

As the possible groundbreaking for construction on Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium pit manufacturing facility draws nearer, the past year has seen countless threats to the controversial project.

It’s been a turbulent 2011 for Santa Fe Public Schools, between the controversial extension of the superintendent’s contract and poor student achievement results. Here’s a look at the numbers that point to the need for reform and an update on related issues.

At an Oct. 25 meeting with the Santa Fe County Indigent Hospital and Healthcare Board, Alex Valdez, CEO of Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, made a presentation asking the county for money.