Los Alamos school board meeting recap: September 9, 2025
Improved parking at high school, facilities assessments, and legislative resolutions for 2026
Los Alamos Public Schools announced plans during its September 9 work session to enter a formal agreement to temporarily lease the former Metzger’s service station lot at the corner of Diamond Drive and Sandia Drive and repurpose it as a parking lot for the high school. Superintendent Jennifer Guy told the board that the agreement with Colorado-based owner Russell Ross would provide more student parking and help alleviate traffic issues caused when parents drop off students.
“We are not buying the property, it’s not forever, but it will help us address some of the traffic issues we’re having right now,” Guy said.
Once improvements to the lot are made, including fencing and painting lines for parking spaces, the new parking lot will provide between 35 to 50 spots, district officials said. During a presentation, officials said they’ve received requests for 413 parking permits, but the high school currently only has 327 spaces to offer, so even if 50 new spots were added, parking demand would still outweigh the total number of spots provided.
Once the lot is ready for use, a single entrance and exit will be located on Sandia Drive, just west of the Diamond intersection.
During the September 9 meeting, Guy told the board she did not have a total cost of the lease and said the district was still finalizing the agreement details. Guy also reminded the board that expenses under $25,000 do not require board approval. Boomtown’s request to the district for the final details of the contract was not answered by press time.
School facility updates
John Spitz from Architectural Research Consultants Inc. summarized the the facilities assessments that his company has undertaken for the school-occupied facilities in Los Alamos townsite. (Both of the newly reconstructed White Rock schools — Piñon and Chamisa — were excluded from the evaluation.)
While none of the facilities evaluated had any critical issues, they were all found to need some form of improvements over the next ten years. For example, Barranca Elementary, which had a major renovation around 2020, was found in need of minor modifications to its playground and parts of the original building exterior. The recommendations for the high school, on the other hand, include replacing D, E, and F wings, and the auxiliary gym, at a cost of more than $207 million. A full summary is available in the presentation (starts on page 20).
Architectural Research Consultants also presented a facilities evaluation for multiple leased properties owned by the school district. The district maintains 208,059 square feet of space across eight leased facilities in Los Alamos, including the former Canyon, Pueblo, and Pajarito Schools (leased to LANL); Mesa Complex (leased to LANL and UNM), Little Forest Playschool, and others.
Legislative proposals
The board also finalized a set of five draft resolutions to submit to the New Mexico School Boards Association in preparation for NMSBA’s lobbying campaign during the upcoming 30-day state legislative session, which begins at noon on January 20.
The resolutions covered the following:
Funding for AI education initiatives, training, and partnerships with Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories
School accreditation: Shift the focus of school accreditation processes “away from primarily procedural and administrative reporting,” and allowing for “flexible professional development opportunities for school board members” and allowing for flexible scheduling for these opportunities
Support staffing in small districts: Allow “limited waivers” to the state’s “nepotism statute” to increase the number of qualified applicants for school jobs in small and rural districts
Math and reading specialists in each school: Allocating recurring funding to ensure that “every public school in the state has at least one full-time math intervention teacher and one full-time reading intervention teacher”
Increase education funding: State Equalization Guarantee formula amount by either 4% of the previous year’s allocation, or the percentage increase in the consumer price index for the preceding calendar year, whichever is greater, as well as asking that “the legislature reaffirm its commitment to fulfilling its constitutional and moral obligation to provide sufficient resources for all New Mexico students, in alignment with the Martinez/Yazzie decision, and ensure that funding mechanisms adapt to changing economic conditions while protecting against future disinvestment”
The full text of the resolutions can be found here.
Stay involved
The next Los Alamos Public Schools Board meeting is scheduled for 5:30 pm on September 25 at Piñon Elementary, 90 Grand Canyon Drive, in White Rock.
The agenda will be posted here prior to the meeting: https://www.laschools.net/school-board/meetings
The meeting can be attended in person or online. Or watch for the summary from Boomtown.