Goals of SFAFS

The goal of the Alliance is to help provide enhanced science learning for the children of Santa Fe and the surrounding communities in their elementary and high school curricula.

It is increasingly clear that this is far from a luxury, because the economic competitiveness and general well-being of the citizens of NM depends crucially on high-quality elementary and secondary school education. This is about an investment in our children and in the future, about keeping NM competitive in a rapidly-changing technological world with dramatically increased international participation. It is also an important part of New Mexico’s attractiveness in luring new workers to come here. It is also about preparing the citizens of NM to be well-informed on issues they face that involve science and technology.

There is a great deal of interest in this topic and a very significant amount of work is already ongoing in Santa Fe and in northern New Mexico. The major difficulty is a lack of coherence, information sharing and joint strategizing between the various activities. The purpose of the Alliance is not to replace what is already happening, but instead to provide a vehicle for bringing much more coherence and focus to the effort, and to find ways to add to it where possible.

Thus the Alliance is intended to be an umbrella organization that facilitates communication and cooperation between already existing efforts. It also wants to recruit, on a broader scale than what has been done so far, interested scientists, technicians and knowledgeable laypeople into local educational activities in science. However, it is our teachers, students and parents who are the central figures, augmented by school administrators. The Alliance exists to help them do their jobs.

Together, these participants would be a powerful agent for positive change and improvement. There are many excellent examples from around the country and the world (e.g. Austin TX, Chicago IL, Berkeley CA, Rayleigh-Durham NC, in Ireland and in Finland) that illustrate what such strong local investments can achieve. We owe it to our children and to our community to try and emulate these successes here in northern New Mexico.

Our goals are to:

• Use the Alliance website and other means to improve substantially the communications and information exchange between all parts of the Santa Fe science education community.


• Set up a consortium of scientific, engineering and technical mentors to work in various ways with interested local students.


• Investigate ways to use mentors as guest teachers in science classrooms.


• Investigate ways to use mentors to help provide enhanced hands-on, inquiry-based learning in science classes via laboratories and other activities.


• Provide possible external science activities for students (e.g. Saturday courses, field trips, mentored study, summer courses and study).


• Create a county-wide annual science fair for K-12 students.


• Develop mechanisms to provide enhanced continuing education for interested science teachers.


• Study the possibility of creating a mechanism for school-system wide coordination of science curricula and other kinds of science activities.


• Study the possibility of a public magnet school emphasizing science.


• Improve connections to similar work in Albuquerque, other parts of NM, and beyond.


• Improve links to state government on educational matters, particularly in science.

Please provide any comments or suggestions you may have to Bob Eisenstein (bob_at_sfafs_dot_org) or Susan McIntosh (susan_at_sfafs_dot_org).