Dear Friends of Española Public Schools,

Welcome to the first issue of Valley, the official magazine of Española Schools. In one of these stories, a fourth grader named Wynter Tafoya studies an aerial photograph of the Valley, the Rio Grande winding through it. "I didn't think it was that big," she says. Reading these pages, I felt exactly the same way.

From inside a single busy day, it is easy to miss how much this Valley holds. Step back a little, and you begin to see it: people showing up for one another, again and again, often without anyone noticing.

You will find them throughout this issue. Dr. Renee Bocanegra greets every child at the bus in Abiquiú, and thirty-two neighbors, not one with a child in her school, answered her invitation with fourteen garden beds. Michael Stovall can still name the men who showed up for him as a boy in Amarillo, and now builds teams around children who need them. Mary Rose Maghanoy crossed an ocean to teach here and found what she calls "the way people fill others' emotional cups." In quieter places, Ross Mondragon and Kenny Gallegos do work whose best days are the ones nobody notices, and Vickie Garcia keeps soft music playing while she protects the possibilities tucked inside a budget.

Many of these people left and came home. Jason Lewis returned to rebuild the trades programs he loved as a student, teaching young people not to fear getting something wrong. Andrew Trujillo, "an Española product," stitches connection across a checkerboard of communities and Pueblo lands so a child's Chromebook works. Our board members, one of whom first ran because nobody would give his PTA the paint it needed, hold themselves to the standard they ask of everyone else.

And our young people are already carrying all of it forward. Ayden Anaya wants to save lives. Amelia describes our school as one "built with determination." Hope Gutierrez finally sent her serve over the net and offered a civic creed I intend to borrow: "You yourself make your own hometown." And Mariyanah Archuleta has learned to use her words. She once held her ground against me across a conference table, and won. I could not be prouder.

These are your neighbors, your teachers, your children. Seen from a little farther away, our Valley is bigger than we knew, and all of it is yours. Welcome home.

With gratitude,

Dr. Karen Sanchez-Griego
Interim Superintendent of Schools