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 clear that this is far from a luxury, because the economic competitiveness and general well-being of the citizens of New Mexico depends crucially on high-quality elementary and secondary school education. This is about an investment in our children and in the future, about keeping New Mexico 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 New Mexico 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 New Mexico generally. A 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 a sort of "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 that illustrate what such strong local investments can achieve. We owe it to our children and to our community to create similar successes here in northern New Mexico.

Our goals are to:

Set up a consortium of scientific, engineering and technical volunteer tutors and mentors to work with interested students. We mean tutoring usually to indicate helping kids to a better understanding of their classroom work, while mentoring usually indicates a longer-term relationship and possibly study of more advanced topics.

• When requested, use STEM volunteers as guest presenters in science classrooms.


• When requested, use STEM volunteers as teachers of full-time high school science courses.


• Help the Santa Fe Public Schools in its creation of a city-wide annual science fair or expo for K-12 students.


• 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.


• Provide possible external science activities for students (e.g. the Santa Fe Science Café for Young Thinkers, possible Saturday courses, special field trips, etc.).


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


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

Please provide any comments or suggestions you may have to SFAFS by contacting us.