By james art 
In the classroom of several first and second grade students at the May Learning Center, teacher Caitlin Trujillo completes an individual reading lesson with a student named Teddy before going to work on reading skills with two more students. As Trujillo indicates a group of four letters listed on the page, one student sounds the words: “Time, down.”
Standing in the school’s library space, Miller says that the center is dedicated to the Joy of Learning. All students have access to a program called Alower Ally, where students can choose a digital version of a book and listen to an audio version of it as the text lights up on the screen.
“It’s that they can see what free reading looks like,” Miller says. “Many of our children have high intelligence and when they first come to us, their actual reading skills do not match their intelligence. In other schools, they have just read books about babies and are so bored with these stories. So we want them to practice at the level of decoding, but they also have the opportunity to read books about the ears that they are really interested. “
For the last 13 years, the May Center has served students in the K-8 classes through a school they manage. All students with whom May Center works have at least one difference in training that interferes with their ability to thrive in a traditional classroom – dyslexia, autism, ADHD and others. The middle class in the building has about six students, with a total of 70 students and highlights the individual learning time to help students succeed.
“Some, especially our younger children, are often mentioned through early intervention, but then many of them are a parent word out of mouth,” Miller says.
As the card of the nation report appeared in 2024 at the end of January and again revealed New Mexico’s condition so that it has the largest reading result in the country, the mission of the learning center to improve the results of reading students in the country has become more successful than ever.
The direct response to the May Center to the Crime of the Literacy of the State is its bright campaign to expand the horizon, a multi -phase expansion of the May Center programming, which will not only extend the enrollment capacity to 100 students, but also increase its teaching institute. There, the teachers are trained in a literacy instruction based on evidence and can become certified reading specialists.
“The report on the country’s most educational assessment … It’s quite scary that this year’s reading results were the largest they had been since they began to make these assessments,” says Robert Glick, a member of the May Board of Trustees. “Someone has to intervene and say, here’s how you can teach children to read. I think the teachers who do this are heroes – and this place leads them. That’s why I’m on the board. “
The Center in May has already completed its first phase of the campaign – buying the Campus building of the former High School at Santa Fa Waldorf’s school in 32 Puesta del Sol, along with five acres of land that the former private school owned. This will not affect the Sun Mountain Community school, Waldorf’s public charter school, which plans to open in the fall and will use the part in the Primary School of the Property of 26 Puesta del Sol.
Last January, the Board of the Santa Fa Waldorf School announced that the Santa Fe preparatory school will buy the same parcel that the Center has already purchased.
Bryana Basser, temporarily acting president on board, sent the following statement to SFR: “According to a new leadership of last July, the organization has been working hard to preserve as much of the campus for holistic-based educational proposals in the Community.
This sale will allow our organization to allow our mortgage debt and to provide a stable and secure home for the Sun Mountain and Enchanted Play Garden Center for early childhood of 26 Puesta del Parcel. We hope that the transaction will close after a successful phase of proper check and look forward to being neighbors with fellow teachers. “
Bassler did not reveal what changed the sale of Santa Fe Prep. SFR also addressed the Santa Fe preparatory school, but did not receive an answer before the press time.
This purchase will allow the May Center to move from its present shared space in the United Methodist Church of St. John to the former Waldorf property in the fall of 2025. The new campus will have “state-of-the-art classrooms, specialized spaces for outdoor training and a lot of future growth.”
“We were breaking down at the seams,” Glick says of the current May Centerh building. “Since I joined the board here – we have been in three different places – none of them have been absolutely perfect. This is quite perfect. “
The second phase of the bright horizons expansion campaign will focus on the Teacher Institute in May to add another building to the five acres that the organization acquires to act as a “home base”.
“Not only do we do a job here as a local school, but the local school can also be to some extent a laboratory school to show all the other teachers how the center does it in May – and how we do it is very good,” Glick says.
Miller says that the May Center Teaching Institute includes the most literacy coaches who go to school districts to lead teachers in structured literacy training “quite intense”, usually for two or three years. The May Center also invites teachers to watch their hours and see their practices in action.
The structured literacy approach, also known as the reading science, teaches students to read, using five pillars: phonemic awareness, phonic, dictionary, proficiency and understanding, replacing a previous method known as “balanced literacy”, in which students learn introductory literacy skills that combine text. Organizations across the country have declared structured literacy as a path to improving low literacy levels.
Since 2018, the Monkey Teacher Institute has served more than 17,000 teachers, and last year he trained 215 teachers, whom Miller pointed out as a show of success, is the four years of work at the Pablo Roybal Institute at Pojoque Pueblo, which serves Class K-3.
“Every teacher who teaches there has gone through our full certification program and they use our curriculum in all their classes. After working with us for about two years, they had the biggest literacy profits in New Mexico, “says Miller. “What works in this small, small environment can also work in a much larger public school environment. We don’t just want to serve the children who go to school here. We want to have a positive impact on New Mexico education for everyone. “
Last year, the Pojoaque Valley school district made titles to improve the percentage of reading skills by 26% last year after several years of literacy training from agreed May teachers.
The last planned phase of May Center will be the construction of a clinical service building offering students and their families a wide range of services from psychological assessments to therapy and consultation,
The May Center is also in support of the Senate 242 bill, a bill that would require applicants to license teachers to be competent in the structured literacy instruction and to implement all education preparation programs to make teachers meet the minimum requirements for a course and credit time in reading. The bill passed through the Senate on February 24th. With 32 to vote and 6 without voice.
“We are conducting teachers training, which was to be done when they were in their prior service programs,” Miller says. “Teachers have to do their entire degree of teaching, then they go to work at school and then they realize,” Oh, I am really not taught to teach reading “and then they have to do a completely different program while they are in their work and that is not fair to them.”
Preparation to move the May Center to Waldorf’s property will begin in the summer, and the May Center says it plans to keep the families, staff and community participating in the move. Anyone interested in the Bright Horizon extension campaign and how to get involved can contact Miller via email at amy@maycenter.org.