More News Columnists

• Bill Slakey: As Trib closes, many questions remain unasked
• Phill Casaus: Don't cry for us, Albuquerque; it was worth it
• Joline Gutierrez Krueger: My Wall of Fame holds memories of people, stories that have mattered

MOST RECENT TRIB STORIES

• ABQTrib.com to remain available
  08:48 a.m., February 25, 2008
• Congressman is indicted
  08:37 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Series of attacks target Green Zone
  08:36 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Iran is defying U.N., agency says
  08:35 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Waterboarding approval probed
  08:34 a.m., February 23, 2008

TRIB IN THE BLOGOSPHERE*

• Ty Murray Invitational thrills fans in Albuquerque
• Is Rome Burning?
• Ominous Skies
• The Road to Invalidation
• Albuquerque company participates in “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”

*Note: The Tribune does not create and is not responsible for the blogosphere's headlines and stories. These links to blogs talking about ABQTrib.com are automatically generated. Use them at your own risk.

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• Comments
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

SHARE THIS STORY [?]

Karen Sanchez-Griego lugs out the schematic drawing, clearly prepared to point out each squiggle, square and right angle that gushed from a community's dream through an architect's pen and onto the naked sand beneath her shoes.

This is going to be beautiful, she says of a new high school on the Southwest Mesa. Who can argue? Has anyone ever seen a blueprint that didn't portend something lovely?

You want to say that Albuquerque Public Schools' latest investment of your tax dollars - 118 million of them, all devoted to a still-unnamed school on 118th Street Southwest - is the budding sign of hope for a long-neglected area of town.

After all, APS has never made such a whopping investment in a single high school. In a city often suspicious of the district's direction, dropping anchor here raises expectations.

But Sanchez-Griego, the principal, knows these drawings are merely an entree, a prop, a preamble to the real issue that faces education on the West Side - and maybe for the district as a whole.

"We have to be dedicated to what goes on inside here," she says, squinting into the morning sun as massive earth movers roar past. "That's the kids, the community, everybody. If not, what good is a new building?"

The tendency in Albuquerque, natural if illusory, is to automatically equate "new facility" with "good education." It doesn't always work that way, and in reality, the whole discussion obscures the essential truth: Good education stems from a community's day-after-day dedication to a school, not merely its willingness to spend money.

West Side, East Side, North Side, South Side: Show me a good school, and I'll show you parents and neighbors who are inside the building every day, regardless of whether it was built in 2006 or 1966.

They're helping, yes, but they're also watching and observing and advocating and role-modeling. That's the difference between "community school" and just, plain "school."

Sanchez-Griego, an APS lifer who grew up on Harris Road Southwest, just over yonder from her new place of employment, is saying as much as she walks the 62-acre site with the job-site foreman, Pete Maese.

There are no buildings here yet. On site for less than two weeks, workers are in the initial stages of moving bone-dry dirt for a freshman academy - the structure that will hold the school's ninth graders when it opens next August.

More structures will follow in the years to come, with all four grades on site by 2010. The kids who come here will be treated to an amazing view, and if the blueprints are to be believed, a 21st century look at high school education.

The school promises an academy-style approach to education, heavy on college prep. That, Sanchez-Griego says, was the mandate and message from the people who lobbied for relief from chronically crowded West Mesa High.

"They wanted to raise the bar for the kids," she says of the parents she met as she walked the neighborhoods that will feed the school.

"They deserve that. And what they told us is, `Are you putting things in there that you'd put at La Cueva?' I'm not trying to compare the two. But the idea is to do the best job we can. And I hold myself responsible, as the leader of the school, to take what the community is asking for and put it into fruition.

"Sometimes, I don't sleep just thinking about it," she says. "Because I know what we've promised the community."

Promising hope - and results - is a whopping commitment. Nobody knows it better than the lady who's tromping through 62 acres of dirt and hope.

But the question for the 2,000 sets of parents, and the thousands of others who live nearby, is simply this: In the long run, will they meet their principal halfway?

Answer the question correctly, and you've got a gem on the Southwest Mesa. Answer it the way we often do, and all you've got is a school.