Taos district outlines progress and budget complications for Full Service Community Schools grant

Reneta Mondragon, associate superintendent for Taos Municipal Schools, gave the board an end‑of‑school‑year report on the district’s Full Service Community Schools federal grant, describing program growth across five school sites and ongoing budgeting and staffing challenges.

The grant’s stated goals include districtwide implementation of the community‑schools model, a continuum of services between schools and community partners, enhanced student success, stronger families and communities, and food‑sovereignty programs. Mondragon said all five participating schools now have site coordinators and dedicated community‑schools rooms, and that after‑school programming and lending libraries are operating at multiple sites.

The district added two schools to the full‑service program scope this grant cycle and received state grant funds that will serve as part of the required local match. Mondragon said, “Our portion is about 10% of the grant,” referring to the district’s cash match requirement. She told the board the district is working to quantify and document match contributions from community partners, in‑kind donations and district spending.

Most of the presentation focused on implementation milestones and operational hurdles. Program accomplishments cited included: establishing greenhouses at school sites; launching after‑school STEM, gardening and book clubs at the middle school; a lending library of camping, cooking and bicycling equipment; and coordination with health, nursing and special‑education staff to support student needs. Mondragon identified community partners and supporters who provided letters and resources, including the Town of Taos, Taos County officials, Taos Pueblo leadership and state representatives.

Mondragon also described multiple administrative challenges. A contractor’s drawdown of roughly $200,000 required reconciliation with federal records; finance staff and district leaders worked through the discrepancy and reported a clarified budget by May. The district previously lost or turned over several grant‑management staff and has posted the district coordinator position three times; Mondragon said interviews had most recently been completed and recommendations would be submitted to Superintendent Layton. She said hiring and retention difficulties are driven in part by local cost of living and by candidates’ concerns about federal‑grant administrative requirements.

On evaluation and reporting, the district ended a contract with David Trujillo & Associates after a federal grants officer and district leaders found the contractor’s proposed evaluation approach did not meet grant expectations. The district contracted Rachel Boren and the SOAR Evaluation and Policy Center at New Mexico State University to serve as evaluator; Boren told the board her team will compile school surveys, activity logs and interview data into a report and recommendations for the district and expects a draft in June with finalization soon thereafter. Boren said the evaluator’s role is to "work with grant leads to see if they're achieving their goals, helping them measure success, however they define that, and then depending on their outcomes ... write reports for grant teams that summarize all of these data." She also described using graduate students and interns to process survey responses and prepare usable summaries for site teams.

Mondragon said the federal grant officer role at the U.S. Department of Education has changed hands and that the district’s new contact has been slow to respond by email; she and others have attempted to re‑establish regular communication. She told the board that federal reporting rules shifted so the program now reports on a school‑year cycle rather than the federal fiscal year, which district staff said simplified some year‑to‑year comparisons.

Board members asked for more detail on the evaluator’s timeline, the content and use of parent and school climate surveys, the status of state matching funds ($40,000 per site for the two newly added schools), and whether the district could create an additional support position to reduce single‑person dependency for grant administration. Several board members urged the administration to improve responsiveness to community donors and partners as part of a sustainability strategy.

The report concluded with a summary of next steps: finalize hiring of a district coordinator, complete the evaluator’s report and recommendations, continue reconciling federal drawdowns with finance, formalize match funding commitments from community partners, and pursue additional state or private grants to sustain programming after federal funds sunset.

Votes at a glance: The board took formal procedural action after the presentation to enter and later exit an executive session (roll calls recorded). No personnel or contract changes were approved on the record during the public meeting; the board stated it intends to discuss superintendent contractual changes at the next regular meeting.

Sources: Taos Municipal Schools board meeting presentation and question‑and‑answer session (Reneta Mondragon; Rachel Boren); district budget and federal grant correspondence summarized during the presentation.