Albuquerque Public Schools
Reflecting on the Vital Impact of Your Work This School Year
In her weekly message, Superintendent Durán Blakey congratulates staff for another successful year.
We’ve wrapped up another school year, and I want to take a moment to acknowledge all you did for our students and thank you for your hard work.
This month, we proudly sent about 4,600 graduates into the world, and we look forward to welcoming a new generation of preschoolers this fall, illustrating the continuous cycle of growth and learning at our schools. But this continuous cycle is grounded in the reality that every student’s year is unrepeatable — they get one chance at kindergarten, one at sixth grade and one at their senior year.
The work we do as educators is vital, and I’m not just referring to our role in helping students learn to read and do math at grade level and preparing them for college or the workforce. We build up their confidence, teach them to work around the roadblocks they encounter, and encourage them to reach for the stars. We also serve as their safety net, providing them with free meals, caring adults to talk to and so much more.
At the center of all this work are our amazing teachers, aides, counselors, school nurses, principals and the many other individuals who work at each of our schools. They are making a difference in our students’ lives.
As I’ve said many times, every role at APS is vital to our students’ success – from our bus drivers and cooks to our accountants, custodians and plumbers.
To all APS employees, I congratulate you on completing another school year, and I thank you for all you did for our students this year.
I see the fruits of your labor during my visits to schools.
The confidence I’m seeing in students at our Coronado Dual Language magnet school is amazing. Months after my visit, I’m still thinking about the precocious student who gave us a tour of her school.
The poise I’ve seen in the eighth-graders at Cleveland Middle School as they deliver their portfolio presentations is also inspiring. They stand before a room of family members, teachers and other school personnel, discuss how much they’ve grown over the last three years and thank those who helped them along the way.
We’ve made a concerted effort this year to focus on things like high-dosage tutoring, deeper learning through Genius Hour for elementary students, fostering a sense of belonging among our sixth graders, and freshman academies at several of our high schools. These freshman academies provide smaller cohorts for ninth graders and encourage them to explore different career options and to focus on work-based learning and real-world connected learning.
I look forward to continuing to build on these strategies next school year!
In the meantime, I hope those of you who are off this summer have the opportunity to rest, relax and explore, and that you’re ready to come back with renewed energy in August. For those of you who work through the summer, I hope you can also carve out time to rest and recharge.
Come August, we all need to be ready to give our students our best. Because they will never get another chance in that grade.
Have a wonderful summer!