Improving Economic Opportunity in Rural Taos County

High in the alpine desert, Taos County, New Mexico is an area of singular natural beauty, for decades drawing outdoor enthusiasts, artists, spiritual seekers, and increasingly, high-income second homeowners and wealthy retirees. While the steady growth has enlivened Taos’s historic town center, the rising rents, home prices, and cost of living can make it difficult for existing residents who bring the area its unique Native American and Hispanic culture.

While the area’s flourishing tourism economy has provided Taos residents with thousands of service jobs, the positions are often seasonal or low-paying work with limited opportunities for advancement. And even as the demand for these workers has rebounded from the pandemic, the jobs are no substitute for the high-income, high-opportunity jobs that, despite its considerable appeal, the area has struggled to attract.

Preparing Taos County citizens for in-demand careers is a priority for the Taos Education Collaborative, a partnership of local businesses, educators, and community organizations that is dedicated to developing a homegrown workforce by boosting educational attainment. Unlike past well-meaning but disjointed efforts, the TEC is working in concert with partner organizations and education institutions to change the systems that have served to thwart educational progress and worsened income inequity here.

Data suggests that the educational systems in Taos County have long underserved this diverse community. Young people here run an unusually high risk of becoming disconnected from school and work. The high school graduation rate here is just 72 percent, and about 16 percent of individuals aged 16-19 are neither working nor in school. That figure is twice the national average.

Disengaged in this way, these young people often now lack comprehensive healthcare and social and emotional supports. Moreover, nearly half of Taos County youth live in single-parent households, and 17 percent live in households where both parents are unemployed.

The Taos Education Collaborative was founded in June 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and in its first year it worked to improve student access and engagement when schools shifted to remote learning. Among other accomplishments, the TEC connected 75 Taos families to home internet, made public more than 100 hot spots for community access, and served more than 125 students in learning labs.

In the process, the collaborative learned much about how institutions and community organizations worked together – or didn’t. Now that the team has moved beyond the immediate pandemic-related crises, it is working to connect resources and to move from short-term solutions to systemic change. As the team members bring other partners together, they aim to build stronger educational pipelines and clearer, better-aligned pathways for higher educational attainment and better economic outcomes.

“Right now, it is hard for the average person to live here, grow up here, get a high quality education, and have a job here or create one in the place that you want to be in. We had to really rethink how the community worked together,” said Elizabeth LeBlanc, the collaborative’s founder and the principal of a local charter school. “The silver lining with the pandemic is that we learned a lot about what is already here in our community that maybe we didn’t know about because we had been broken down into communications silos previously. The pandemic kind of forced us to come together in new ways”

So the collaborative’s first goal in working with CivicLab’s Building Rural Community Learning Systems has been to see how all these services and programs can connect throughout the education continuum. They don’t link up very well right now, LeBlanc says. “Now every time there is a transition [from middle school to high school, for instance], students kind of have to re-up, retrain with whatever organization they are coming into contact with,” LeBlanc says. “The question is how do we make sure that what we know works for them stays intact as they make that transition? We have to put duct tape on the pipeline.”

“We went through each transition point to see where there was a smooth handoff,” says LeBlanc. “Early childhood or K through eight, for instance, who are the people there? We looked at eighth grade and high school graduation. What are the supports for transitions there?”

The team continued to visualize the supports that existed beyond high school, identifying the Taos Education and Career Center as a place for high school equivalency degrees and adult learning, as well as the community organizations that serve to support those students. They identified the University of New Mexico’s Taos campus as the four-year institution. “Then,” LeBlanc says, “We stalled out.” In short, the options grew more and more limited as students progressed. What were the other ways students might pursue postsecondary education without leaving Taos? “It was sort of an eye-opener,” says LeBlanc.

As the TEC continues its work, its next step is to gather partners around each transition point and ask “what the collaborative is uniquely poised to do in our community that doesn’t replicate what is already here,” LeBlanc says. As it does so, the team is making the most of CivicLab’s teachings and other resources. “There are times when I look at [the system-building materials] and I think, ‘wow this is amazing, can we actually do this?’” LeBlanc says. “But you can see the potential of it, and then there is this moment of ‘whoa.’”

The team frequently draws on the ready technical expertise and thought partnership of the CivicLab facilitators – what LeBlanc calls an “overall wraparound of support.” Likewise, TEC has learned much from their fellow cohort members across the nation; the Florida team, for instance, shared helpful advice on how to track down school drop-outs and other disengaged individuals. “It helps to see how they tackle their problems,” says LeBlanc. “They can tell us what they did that worked and what they did that didn’t work.”

LeBlanc finds benefit simply in connecting with other rural communities over common challenges and goals. For one thing, she says, “We don’t have to explain rurality. It’s so awesome not to have to explain the limitations – and joys – of being in a rural community to other folks.” At the same time, she welcomes the support and advice from her fellow team leaders. “I’ve been a leader of a school, but trying to be a leader in my community is a little scarier in a whole lot of ways,” says LeBlanc. “So having other people who are also stepping into that role is hugely helpful.”

LeBlanc likes to illustrate the work of the TEC with a photograph of Taos’s Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. At 650 feet above the river, it is the second highest bridge in the U.S. interstate highway system and the fifth highest in the country overall. When the highway segment on one side sat unfinished in the 1960s, it was known as the “bridge to nowhere.” Today it ties together regions across the state -- and draws visitors from around the world.

The Taos Education Collaborative wants to serve as that kind of link – forging the vital community connections that will take the young people of Taos wherever in life they want to go.

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