Las Cruces Academy

Dear Friends of Las Cruces Academy,

The students are thriving in all our classes.  We have details later.  First, we need to tell you about the great support we’ve received.

This has been a very good season for us. Our students are making good progress and we are getting support from the community; we have received several very generous checks from friends in the community. El Paso Electric has for the third time, given us a check for $2,500 for use as scholarships, and the Giles W. & Elise G. Mead Foundation of Napa, CA awarded us $35,000 for our capital campaign. We have even received several small, but treasured gifts from our students; even two of our 5 year-olds have brought in money they earned.   Over our 4 years of incorporated existence, we have had the rewarding experience of receiving $72,898 in cash and $80,144 in goods in-kind.   Services donated by the parents of our students and our friends are valued at $23,048, critical supplements to the 8.5 person-years volunteered by our Board of Trustees.   We’ve had some attractive and durable cards printed up for all of you, our supporters.  Come visit us and we’ll give you your card...and show you our even livelier school.

We are all very excited about the capital campaign. With our current student population of 27, slightly more than twice our starting number of 13 students, we are soon going to run short of space. We currently have 4 classrooms, but will need more next academic year, assuming that the number of students continues to grow. Since we already have parents of 2 and 3-year olds inquiring about the school, we expect increasing enrollment. Our parents report that our reputation in the community is good, which is gratifying to hear.  We held a celebration of our progress and a recognition of our donors on 12 November.  It was well-attended by our school parents and friends, if only lightly by our donors elsewhere in the community.  Still, the preparations were extremely valuable.  They motivated board chair Vince Gutschick and board member David Gutschick to generate the raft of documents that we’ll be using to approach potential donors.  The documents detail our progress to date, our vision for the students, oru vision for the new campus, our financial plans, and our ability to manage the Academy and its growth.  We’ll be posting all these on the Academy Website, http://lascrucesacademy.org, very soon.

We’ll be overjoyed if you can join us in the capital campaign, whether as a donor or as a volunteer.   We expect that we will make 2,000 contacts with about 800 potential donors in order to raise our $1 million.  Vince can give you training in the effective ways to find potential donors, cultivate their relationship with the Academy, finally get to “the ask”...and then help in stewardship of the donations, in which the donors get accounting for their gift and appropriate recognition.  Vince received a wealth of training from the Fundraising School of Indiana University, on how to do all this with professionalism and with the highest expectation of success.  Please contact him at (575) 571-2269 or at vince@lascrucesacademy if you have the will and the time to put in.  We’ll be extremely grateful.

We’ve had another boost for our presence in the community.  Carlos Correa came to the Academy on Wednesday, 30 November and filmed a segment of the Newsmakers program hosted by Fred Martino.   It’s been aired on KRWG-FM already and we look foward to the TV airing.

You may be well aware of our plans to acquire a fine property and build a new campus that will accommodate out growth to serve the 350 students in grades pre-K through 12 we see in our future.  Our planning has been advanced by the advice and efforts of many community members whom we’ve reached out to involve.  We’ve had enlightening advice and been given the names of valuable contacts by State Sens. Mary Kay Papen and Steve Fischmann, our tax accountant Norm Fristoe, artist-realtor-teacher Kate Mott, development officer Bruce Begin, and a slew of other people whom we’ve contacted.  Most recently, Vince Gutschick visited Neal Piltch, Head of School at the K-5 Manzano Day School, an academic standout in Albuquerque.  Up there, he also visited Carla Tidwell, Director of Admissions, and Julie Cook, Director of Development, at Sandia Prep, the highly regarded school serving grades 6-12.

Even though we are only through about 40% of the school year, most of the students are through the first of two math books. We are using internationally top-rated Singapore Math, which I am finding more impressive as I have more experience with it. The teacher of the older students tells me that he will have the students do challenging problems for much of the remainder of the term. This will allow them to develop greater strength and understanding of the concepts and calculations they have studied. These problems are not easy. A couple of weeks ago one of the third grade students asked that I help with one of the challenging problems. I had to send the student off for a few minutes while I figured out how to do it. I would have used algebra, but Singapore Math has them learn to visualize the problem by using bar graphs. The students start seeing word problems in kindergarten, so they not only know how to do the calculations, they learn when a specific type of calculation is used.  

The language classes are also seeing good progress. In Chinese all but the kindergarten students are writing. One of our third year students is now writing her own stories, which our Chinese teacher says is very good, comparable to second-year college-level Chinese. This student is also able to read stories that she has never seen before. In Spanish, all students are busy learning vocabulary words; the older students are also learning how to conjugate verbs. And in English, the students spend much time reading and writing. The younger ones can explain the different genres of writing and were surprised when they discovered they enjoyed writing non-fiction papers about what they had learned about the oceans.  Most of the young students and some of the older ones are covering phonics, so they can easily meet new words and spell words more easily. The older students have been writing prolifically; one of their favorite genres is reader’s theater; as a group they have been writing and producing about one play per week. None of the plays will make it to Broadway, but the students are eager to write and it gives them experience being in front of a group.

One of our parents related a story about science class last week. Her kindergarten student and his colleagues have been learning about the body, including the circulatory system. It seems one of the university students associated with the parent admitted that he didn’t know what blood platelets did. Our 5-year old student explained it to him. We have been hearing similar stories about the older students telling adults facts about the Solar System.

Wait - there’s still more.  Vince, Lou Ellen, and David are offering to lead a trip to Bali and Sulawesi in July of 2012.   We have a dual goal - share the cultural richness of the kind that we bring to the students, and raise a bit of money, too, via a $1,000 per-person donation.  If that 2nd item doesn’t deter your or some of your friends, then please look up the trip on our Website, at http://lascrucesacademy.org/Indo.

As we finish writing this newsletter the students and their teachers are getting ready for the end-of-term student presentation and accompanying potluck supper. The older children are memorizing poems and interesting facts about the Solar System (which is stranger than I had imagined) and the younger ones are singing and rehearsing. We are all excited about the fact that we will have yet another teacher join us in January, a music teacher. We had a teaching interview and we all loved her.