In middle school art teacher Megan Avina’s classroom, students don’t sit and wait for instruction. In what is known as Milagro Middle School’s ”Maker Space,” students are encouraged to follow their inspiration. To trigger some, Avina’s room brims with recycled fabrics, paints, clays and past student projects ranging from ceramics to a Chinese New Year’s dragon.
Zozobra was at the center of a recent papier mâché project. Avina encouraged students to create a personalized version of the local conduit for communal gloom. Results varied: one was modeled after a chicken nugget with a video game character’s face, while another Zozobra owned a taco stand and another was made to -resemble rapper 50 Cent.
In an early October class, Avina showed a few of her students how to operate a sewing machine in preparation for the 2024 Recycle Santa Fe Art Festival’s “trash fashion show” taking place in November. For the project, Avina’s students are sewing together used potato chip bags to make outfits.
“I try to make it a nice, safe, fine place to be so that they can create,” Avina tells SFR of her teaching approach. She believes stricter instruction “will turn them off to art for a very long time.”
To encourage self-expression, Avina presents students with several mediums, but more importantly, displays all their art.
Mo Charnot
Milagro teacher Megan Avina shows a student how to use a sewing machine in order to make a costume for 2024 Recycle Santa Fe Art Festival’s “trash fashion show.”
“When they came on August 10, they said, ‘I don’t like art. I don’t know why I’m in this class. I don’t do art. I’m not an artist. I can’t draw.’ That’s what they’ll say,” Avina says. “And this is art, these little tricks in things that they see every day, and they’ll remember.”
While the Maker Space brought the most color to the Midtown area middle school after Avina was brought into the school about six years ago, the classroom doesn’t host the only burgeoning elective at Milagro. In the Apple Lab classroom installed at Milagro a few years ago, students learn coding, and this year a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) class arrived.
The increased focus on student enrichment through electives like these is part of a series of reforms Santa Fe Public Schools are installing at the middle school level to address inequity—the district’s ongoing Reimagining Process.
The Reimagining Process, envisioned by the SFPS Board of Education in the 2019-2020 school year, was created to address the school district’s declining enrollment and aging facilities. A cornerstone of the process, as shown in a 2022 presentation, is to reimagine programs to be more engaging for students and include subjects like dual languages, computer science, visual and performing arts, business and more.
The Reimagining Steering Commit-tee has since identified middle schools as an area in need of these programs. In a January 2024 meeting, the committee worked on a list of challenges and opportunities the middle schools currently face, with student retention listed as an overarching challenge.
Veronica García, director of the district’s Reimagining Steering Committee, told SFR in an interview last year that many parents in Santa Fe currently choose to enroll their middle school-age students in local charter or private schools. García said in January that she hopes student engagement at the middle school level through magnet and specialty programs will change the trend.
At an October 10 SFPS Board of Education meeting, the school board voted unanimously in favor of a resolution specific to middle schools, directing Superintendent Hilario “Larry” Chavez to establish a middle school level education council.
Courtesy Google Streetview
Milagro Middle School opened its doors in 2019, after the former DeVargas and Capshaw middle schools were closed and consolidated into one school.
The council is intended to “engage and educate constituents about innovative programming” available at the district’s middle schools. Additionally, the council is to spend the year recommending ways to reimagine the delivery of middle school education, with a timeline.
“I think it’s very important for everyone involved to understand the options that are available, the innovative programming that’s taking place and the great things happening at our middle schools,” Chavez said at the meeting.
At the meeting, García stressed the importance of middle school students receiving “more exploration and hands-on learning” in the classroom.
“They’re not high school students, and they’re not elementary students, and they have very unique developmental needs,” García said.
Milagro Principal Georgia Baca says new electives at her school are aimed at increasing enrollment. She says Milagro “doesn’t really have a good reputation,” due to the school being relatively new, and a cause of two former middle schools (De Vargas and Capshaw) closing. She says the school’s relatively small population (under 400 students) is the result.
“We want to change our narrative,” Baca says. “Too often, I think it’s all about perception, and it’s word of mouth and what you’ve heard, but they really don’t know what’s going on.”
Board member Roman “Tiger” Abeyta read a statement from board member Kate Noble, who was not present at the meeting.
“We have an opportunity to focus much-needed energy and attention on our middle grades and better support the development of our students at this crucial time in their lives,” Noble’s statement read. “I hope we can continue to engage families in creating more relevant and experiential learning for these ages while ensuring a safe and supportive environment.”
Diana Padilla, Milagro’s Community Schools coordinator, tells SFR she feels middle school is the area where students are in most need of stronger support.
“This age is sometimes the forgotten age,” Padilla says, “It’s an age where we don’t know what to do with them because they’re kind of silly, and they’re a little bit funky…figuring out who they are.”
In regard to the school’s increased focus on these programs, Baca says she is hoping for more families to visit to see what they’re up to.
“There are so many beautiful things happening by the people who are in here,” Baca says. “We have teachers who are super excited to teach their kids and get the community to be partners with us.”
A few years after Avina established the Maker Space at Milagro, teacher Alan Lucero designed a computer science class under an earlier assistant principal’s direction. After teaching a semester-long course where students learned to code through the Python programming language, the success of the class led to Lucero expanding the curriculum into a year-long class.
“I really appreciate the support that the district’s giving to both [the STEM] program and mine,” Lucero tells SFR. “I get statements from the head of digital learning that he wants Milagro to be a center for computing excellence…I took a professional development [course] …on safe ways to bring AI into the classroom. I find it all really exciting.”
Mo Charnot
Milagro Principal Georgia Baca visits the school’s garden, which teacher Mark Waugh uses for hands-on lessons in his STEM class.
Milagro’s STEM class only began this year, but Baca says the class had “been in the plans” for nearly two years beforehand and was only temporarily put aside due to a shortage of teachers.
According to the school’s former assistant principal Susan Greig, Milagro’s administration became interested in developing a STEM program because it would give students more opportunities to be prepared for high school programs.
“That was a really big thing that we want to get our kids ready for,” Greig told SFR. “We don’t just want to stick to traditional methods of traditional work. STEM, to me, is an opportunity for kids to learn lifelong skills and learn about how science works in reality.”
Mark Waugh, who formerly taught science, began this year’s STEM class with a focus on climate change induced by global warming. He tells SFR so far, students had studied real-world events like the summer fires and subsequent flooding in Ruidoso and looked at ways to “mitigate or adapt” to climate change.
“We’re also doing…basically an understanding of the local environment, and how things like climate change are affecting us,” Waugh says.
Some of his plans for the class this school year include teaching students how to grow their own plants through both soil-based methods and hydroponics. Waugh explained that teaching horticulture is one way he believes students can adapt to climate change, saying it “gets them out of the food desert that they seem to be in.”
Mo Charnot
Milagro teacher Mark Waugh shows off the school’s hydroponic horticulture system that he and students plan to use to grow plants indoors.
Padilla says in the STEM program’s growing classes, which typically involve visits to the school’s garden, the students’ excitement is palpable.
“You can watch them, and it’s working,” Padilla says. “You can actually see them engaging when they’re in the dirt or building a greenhouse.”
Additionally, the STEM students are participating in this school year’s Climate Innovation Challenge, in which students must produce a video explaining and advocating for a potential solution to a specific climate problem.
One student is focusing on how climate change affects polar bears. A few want to center their projects on melting permafrost. Some are interested in studying how drought-induced bark beetle damage results in wildfires and flooding.
“It’s cool because they’re coming up with things that I hadn’t thought of, -different sort of takes on the big picture,” Waugh said. “It doesn’t have to be anything that’s achievable, but if it’s given some serious, rational thought, there is some potential that eventually some of these things could be used and realized. We’ll see, but at least it gets them thinking. And critical thinking is what kids need seriously right now.”
Additionally, Lucero has connected his own class’s projects to Waugh’s, noting one project where he gave students 30 years of satellite data on global sea levels, which students must chart on their own. According to Greig, covering similar subject matter across classes is intentional.
“We don’t want our programs ultimately to be in isolation,” Greig told SFR. “The ultimate goal for us is to have our kids enriched by all these experiences. We want the children in the computer science class to maybe work on something that they’re doing in a different class with a different perspective…there’s this collaboration.”
Milagro endures in wake of tragedy
Editor’s Note: When interviewing educators at Milagro Middle School for this story, assistant principal Susan Greig was among the staff who spoke to SFR. So was STEM teacher Mark Waugh. However, before publication, the two educators were involved in a car crash that killed Greig and left Waugh in a Colorado hospital facing multiple surgeries. Milagro remains in mourning over the loss of Greig while prayers and well-wishes continue for Waugh as he recovers.
During the week following Milagro Middle School assistant principal Susan Greig’s death in an October 11 car accident that also hospitalized STEM teacher Mark Waugh, students and teachers at Milagro came together to mourn and celebrate Greig’s life.
When students returned from a long weekend on Oct. 15, staff from the school district’s Office of Student Wellness and social services organization Gerard’s House were available to any students or faculty in need of support. On Oct. 18, the school’s seventh-grade students worked together to create a painting memorializing Greig. Additionally, Milagro Principal Georgia Baca says she is looking at other ways to celebrate Greig, such as dedicating the school’s garden to her.
Following the accident in Rio Grande County, Colo., Waugh was flown to a hospital in Colorado Springs, and will need to undergo several surgeries. His daughter, Willow, has been providing Baca with updates on his condition. The first was Oct. 14. Hospital officials tell SFR he remains in fair conditions as of Tuesday afternoon.
Baca says Waugh’s STEM class is being covered internally by several teachers at Milagro while he recovers, and that she and other school administrators will be discussing a possible long-term substitute. Baca says the future of the class itself is uncertain because the STEM class was “a great passion” for Waugh, and she feels the class “would not be the same without him.”
