In a classroom of a few first- and second-grade students at the May Center of Learning, teacher Caitlin Trujillo completes an individual reading skills lesson with a student named Teddy, before moving on to work on reading skills with two more students. As Trujillo points to a group of four-letter words listed on the page, one student sounds out the words: “Time, down.”
Standing in the school’s library space, Miller says the center is devoted to “the joy of learning.” All students have access to a program called Learning Ally, where students can pick out a digital version of a book and listen to an audio version of it as the text lights up on the screen.
“It’s so they can see what fluent reading looks like,” Miller says. “A lot of our kids have high intellect, and when they first come to us, their actual reading skills are not matching their intellect. In other schools, they’ve just been reading baby books, and they’re so bored by those stories. So we want them to practice at their decoding level, but also have the opportunity to ear-read books that they really are interested in.”
For the past 13 years, the May Center of Learning has been serving students in grades K-8 through a school they run. All students the May Center works with have at least one learning difference that interferes with their ability to thrive in a traditional classroom—dyslexia, autism, ADHD and others. The average class in the building has about six students, with a total nearing 70 students, and individual instruction time is emphasized to help the students succeed.
“Some, especially our younger kids, often get referred through early intervention, but then a lot of it is parent word-of-mouth,” Miller says.
As the 2024 Nation’s Report Card came out at the end of January and once again revealed the state of New Mexico to have the lowest reading score in the country, the May Center for Learning’s mission to improve reading outcomes for students in the state has become more urgent than ever.
The May Center’s direct response to the state’s literacy crisis is its Bright Horizon Expansion Campaign, a multi-phase expansion of the May Center’s programming that would not only expand enrollment capacity to 100 students, but would also grow its Teacher Institute. There, teachers are coached in evidence-based literacy instruction and can become certified reading specialists.
“The report about the latest educational assessment for the country…that’s pretty scary, that scores this year for reading were the lowest they’ve been since they started doing these assessments,” says Robert Glick, a member of the May Center’s Board of Trustees. “Somebody’s got to step in and say, here’s how you can teach kids to read. I think teachers who do that are heroes—and this place is leading them. That’s why I’m on the board.”
The May Center has already completed its first phase of the campaign—purchasing the former Santa Fe Waldorf School’s high school campus building at 32 Puesta del Sol, along with five acres of land the former private school owned. This will not affect the Sun Mountain Community School, a Waldorf public charter school that plans to open in the fall and will use the elementary school portion of the property at 26 Puesta del Sol.
Last January, the Santa Fe Waldorf School’s Board of Trustees announced the Santa Fe Preparatory School would purchase the same parcel of land the May Center has now purchased.
Briana Bassler, the board’s interim president, sent the following statement to SFR: “Under new leadership since last July, the organization has worked hard to preserve as much of the campus as possible for holistic, nature-based educational offerings in the community.
This sale will enable our organization to resolve our mortgage debt and provide for a stable and secure home for the Sun Mountain Community School and the Enchanted Play Garden Early Childhood Center on the 26 Puesta Del Sol parcel. We are hopeful that the transaction will close after a successful due diligence phase and we very much look forward to being neighbors with fellow educators.”
Bassler did not disclose what changed with the sale to Santa Fe Prep. SFR also reached out to the Santa Fe Preparatory School but has not received a response before press time.
This purchase will allow the May Center to relocate from its current shared space within St. John’s United Methodist Church to the former Waldorf property in the fall of 2025. The new campus would have “state-of-the-art classrooms, dedicated outdoor learning spaces and ample acreage for future growth,” according to a press release from the May Center.
“We were busting at the seams,” Glick says of the current May Centerh building. “Ever since I joined the board here—we’ve been in three different places—none of them were absolutely perfect. This is pretty ideal.”
Phase two of the Bright Horizon Expansion Campaign will focus on the May Teacher Institute plans to add another building to the five acres the organization is acquiring to act as a “home base.”
“Not only are we performing a job as a local school here, but that local school could be and is, to some extent, a lab school to show all the other teachers how the May Center does it—and how we do it is very well,” Glick says.
Miller says the May Center’s Teacher Institute mostly involves literacy coaches going to school districts to lead teachers in structured literacy training “pretty intensively,” typically for two or three years. The May Center also invites teachers to observe their classes and see their practices in action.
The structured literacy approach, also known as the science of reading, teaches students to read using five pillars: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension, replacing a previous method known as “balanced literacy,” in which students learn introductory literacy skills that combine text with context and imagery. Organizations statewide have touted structured literacy as the path to improving low literacy rates.
Since 2018, the May Teacher Institute has served more than 17,000 educators, and trained 215 teachers last year One example Miller points to as a show of success is the May Teacher Institute’s four years of work with the Pablo Roybal Elementary School in the Pojoaque Pueblo, which serves grades K-3.
“Every teacher who teaches there has gone through our full certification program, and they use our reading curriculum in all of their classes. After working with us for about two years, they had the largest literacy gains in the state of New Mexico,” Miller says. “What works in this tiny, little environment can also work in a much larger public school environment. We don’t want to just serve the kids who go to school here. We want to positively impact education in New Mexico for everybody.”
Last year, Pojoaque Valley School District made headlines for improving its reading proficiency rate by 26% last year after a few years of literacy training from contracted May Center teachers.
The May Center’s final planned phase will be to build a clinical services building, offering students and their families a wide range of services from psychological assessments to therapy and counseling,
The May Center is also in support of Senate Bill 242, a bill that would require teacher licensing candidates to be competent in structured literacy instruction and mandate all education preparation programs to have teachers meet the minimum course and credit hour requirements in the science of reading. The bill passed through the Senate on Feb. 24. with 32 yes votes and 6 no votes.
“We’re doing the training of the teachers that should have been done when they were in their pre-service programs,” Miller says. “Teachers have to do their entire teaching degree, then they go to work in a school, and then realize, ‘Oh, I really wasn’t taught to teach reading,’ and then they have to do a whole other program while they’re in their jobs, and that’s not fair to them.”
Preparations to move the May Center to the Waldorf property will begin over the summer, and the May Center says it plans to keep families, staff and the community involved in the move. Anyone interested in the Bright Horizon Expansion Campaign and how to get involved can contact Miller through email at amy@maycenter.org.
