Kendra Ruminer's Two Cents of Real Estate

Take A Peek At Los Alamos, New Mexico

Month: January 2023

Small Town, Even MORE Schools!

January 26, 2023 /

In my last post, I barely scratched the surface of where, why, and how our schools here in Los Alamos have evolved. If you didn’t catch that post, please click back and take a look. I won’t recap here, mostly because there are A LOT of schools left to cover!

Something that has always puzzled newcomers to town is the placement of our elementary schools. Sometimes their locations make sense. For example, Barranca Mesa Elementary serves residents from both Barranca and North Mesa. Yep. Those areas are certainly on the “far edge” of town and nearest to that elementary school. But why would the only Middle School in the county be in that area too? Honestly, I began my exploration of current and past schools because I was curious, and because I get asked about schools a lot. It’s almost the first question parents ask when they’re looking at a potential home purchase. So, continuing from my last post, I thought I’d focus solely on the elementary schools for a moment.

Mountain Elementary

The third elementary school built after Central School outgrew its ability to educate grades 1-12, Mountain was named by the AEC because… (drumroll, please) it’s closer to the mountains than the previous two school buildings. Mountain Elementary was built in 1950 and was the only “original” elementary school that did not eventually have a satellite school, but more about that in a moment.

Aspen Elementary

Aspen Elementary was number four. Built in 1951, it was named for the popular Aspen trees visible from the schoolyard. If that seems a bit odd in modern times, it might be that you never had an opportunity to view the fall colors from Aspen’s parking lot prior to the Cerro Grande fire. The name was actually one of the school’s most distinctive features. It was the first school named for a local plant species, a trend which would continue. Aspen was also one of the first elementary schools to receive a much needed construction overhaul. If you’re wondering what it looked like before, take a look at the other schools built in that general timeframe and you can probably get the correct idea.

Pajarito Elementary School

Built in the late 1950s, Pajarito Elementary school is located at the “top” of town on Arizona Avenue. The school building has been an office complex for far longer than it was a school. If you look at an aerial photo of the building, it’s possible to see why it was chosen for downsizing. The school was built during a population boom, but did not have the capacity to make it useful for that purpose in the long term. Why didn’t they build it bigger to begin with? During that time period, it wasn’t as much of a concern that all of the students assigned to an elementary school be at the same building. If they could find two classrooms here and eight there and maybe the rest at the main building, that was just fine.

Barranca Mesa Elementary

Even though the first homes went up on Barranca Mesa in 1958, the elementary school did not become approved by the AEC until the second group (subdivision) of homes on Barranca Mesa was well underway. The first students attended classes at the elementary school in 1962. The elementary school looks significantly different these days after undergoing a dramatic renovation in 2020. Considering the dates of their initial construction, it isn’t surprising that Barranca Mesa and Pinon were nearly identical in architecture.

Photo of the new construction walkthrough in 2020 courtesy of LA Daily Post

Pinon Elementary School

By 1963, the student population of White Rock Elementary was bursting at the seams. The AEC decided to build a much larger, modern school on the other side of White Rock. Of course, the name Pinon came from the rather excessive population of Pinons in the White Rock area. Realistically, Pinon was built to accommodate a large number of students. As Mirador expands, Pinon is once again absorbing a large number of students, a situation that will be addressed with the exciting new school remodeling plans underway in our district.

Chamisa Elementary School

Even with the addition of Pinon School in 1963, the new building wasn’t able to keep up with the exploding population of White Rock in the sixties. By the mid 1960s, the AEC was in the process of turning over a good number of public services to civilian control. The last thing that the AEC did for the Los Alamos Public Schools prior to turning responsibility for the district over to LAPS, was to build Chamisa Elementary School. The new school went up on the grounds of the former White Rock Elementary School, which is why many locals remember Chamisa as older than Pinon. According to Craig Martin, the first principal of Chamisa wanted to call the school Chaparral Elementary, but the AEC decided that Chamisa was more appropriate due to the enormous presence of Chamisa shrubs in and around the White Rock area. Even in their final moments, the AEC stuck to their naming formula!

Photo courtesy of the LA Daily Post

Satellite Schools

You don’t have to look far into Los Alamos history to see the enormous ebb and flow of our population. I spoke in my last post about the incredible way that our schools have tried to accommodate the student population without making it necessary to bus our kids outside the county. In the beginning, this had a lot to do with the nature of the “Secret City” mentality. As I mentioned above in my discussion of Pajarito Elementary School, sometimes students are educated in whatever space can be utilized for that purpose. Throughout the years prior to a stabilization in the population sometime in the seventies, the schools would often find or build “extra”space for learning environments. This need gave rise to “satellite schools” in the fifties. There were “officially” five of these schools, and most are still being used as “school” facilities.

Canoncito School

Craig Martin describes this very first satellite school as an overflow of Canyon Elementary’s population. The structure used had originally been built in 1947 as a laundromat and was repurposed into two classrooms in 1956. The building only had room for first and second grades. Las Cumbres currently occupies the original Canoncito School. However, just around the corner on Canyon Rd, Canyoncito Montessori is now a private pre-K school here in town.

Little Valley School

Little Valley was a satellite school of Mesa Elementary and also part of the high school at one point. If you went to LAHS fifteen years ago or more, you’ll remember the Little Valley building as L Wing. The building is technically down the hill and across Orange Street from the high school at the “head” of “Olive Street”. Olive Street is a trailhead these days and “L Wing” now houses the Family Strengths Network, which means it’s doing very much the same thing it always has.

Little Poplar School

Little Poplar was named for its parent school, Aspen Elementary. An Aspen tree is a variety of poplar after all. Little Poplar was located on 36th Street. It’s likely that whatever building housed this satellite school was either lost during the fire or was torn down to make way for housing.

Little Forest School

Little Forest is now a privately run daycare and preschool, but the building began life as a second satellite school for Aspen Elementary. One look at the current building and you can see striking similarities between it and almost all of the original school buildings here in Los Alamos. Little Forest was named for the surrounding pines which were far thicker in that area.

Little Sagebrush School

If you’re getting into the rhythm of naming schools, you’ll probably already guess that Little Sagebrush was a satellite school located in White Rock. The school actually served the original White Rock Elementary School prior to Pinon Elementary being built. A good number of you might remember a Montessori school in White Rock called Sage Cottage which unfortunately did not survive the pandemic. I’ve not dug any further into a connection between the names, but a connection is entirely possible. Sage is a common plant on the Pajarito Plateau, which is why the AEC chose the name for Little Sagebrush in the first place. The building did not survive the expansion of White Rock in the sixties.

If you’re still a bit turned around trying to see how all of these schools fit together to fill the educational needs of a growing Los Alamos, check out their locations on Google Maps. And if you’re still wondering how our secondary schools fit in, check back next time. I’ve finally made my way through the primary schools to the point where Middle School and Junior High meet High School and the Freshman Academy. And if you’re ready to move in or out of our amazing school district, give me a call! I’d love to talk education and housing in Los Alamos with you.

Small Town, Lots of Schools!

January 18, 2023 /

It isn’t difficult to understand the importance of “schools” when thinking about the history of Los Alamos. The reason Los Alamos exists as it does today is largely due to the Ranch School already occupying the Pajarito Plateau. The Fuller Lodge complex was quite literally the “first” school “building” in Los Alamos. This actually suggests education in Los Alamos goes back farther than science, research, or development.

The ranch school offered young men an education that most of us today would consider on par with one of the wilderness style programs often associated with troubled kids needing a boarding school with limited access to technology and modern comforts. Back then, the Los Alamos Ranch School developed work ethic, tenacity, and a can do attitude that was considered necessary for success in life.

The last class of students at the Ranch School finished their studies and left the mesa in January of 1943. The town of Los Alamos appeared as a jumble of hastily renovated or fabricated buildings within days and weeks of the students’ departure. A short while later, families of the technical and scientific staff arrived on the mesa. The ranch school was gone, so where did these kiddos go to school? The history and development of our nationally recognized school district might surprise you.

Photo of Ranch School students in front of the Oppenheimer house courtesy of Los Alamos Historical Society archives

Log Cabin Education

The first “school” serving a handful of children occupying Los Alamos in mid to late 1943 was located in what Craig Martin calls a “log structure” attached to the Guest Cottage. Considering just how rural most of America still was in the early 1940s, this wasn’t unusual. In fact, lessons taught at the log cabin school were probably pretty high quality for the same reasons we experience high quality education in our district now. Educated scientists, engineers, and skilled technical staff weren’t shy in demanding good education for their offspring.

Central School

Students weren’t educated in the log cabin for very long. The Manhattan Project build a school on the west end of the current location of Mesa Public Library. On a map, it appears in the area of where Circle Drive is currently located. The school was just that: “Los Alamos School”. It’s location on the opposite side of the mesa from the technical areas was chosen for safety reasons. “It was built in rows of rooms, each one a level below the other and connected by steep walkways (Martin, 1998).” It’s strange, but when I read Craig Martin’s description of Central School, it reminds me a lot of the High School building prior to it’s renovation.

Central School courtesy of Craig Martin

Central School got its name when Los Alamos outgrew it. The name came from its location in the center of town. Central School remained in use both prior to and after the war years. Once it was determined that Los Alamos would remain in use after the war, the Atomic Energy Commission began building additional elementary schools and Central School housed high school students until the current high school location was built in 1949. By 1966, Central School was outdated and no longer in use. It was torn down and the building materials were repurposed for other projects as often happened in those days.

Mesa School

If you’re not a history buff, you might have heard locals mention Mesa School, but probably have no clue where it was located. Mesa School was the first of two new elementary education facilities built here in Los Alamos in the late 1940s. The remains of Mesa School are now part of UNM-LA. If you consider the history of housing expansion in Los Alamos, Mesa School’s location near Western Area makes an awful lot of sense. In fact, it would be rather handy to have an elementary school in that area now. Considering the UNM-LA campus dates back to 1956 with the inception of the Center for Graduate Studies, its likely that Mesa School transitioned to its new “higher educational purpose” at that time.

Canyon School

The second of the new elementary schools here in town, Canyon School was located on the other end of Central Avenue near the intersection of Central and Canyon. The school was named for its close proximity to Canyon Rd and to Pueblo Canyon. For the record, this total lack of imagination in naming things around Los Alamos was an active choice by the Atomic Energy Commission. It has been suggested that the naming scheme might have been impacted by security concerns. Names reflected locations as a method of helping with navigation around town without the need for street signs. During a lull in enrollment, Canyon School was converted to Canyon Complex and now houses offices for professionals instead of schoolchildren. Canyon School isn’t the only school in the Los Alamos District to end up as office buildings, but more on that later.

From the side, it’s rather obvious that the Canyon Complex is a school building. The complex front which faces the new roundabout has had a nice facelift.

White Rock Elementary School

Remember that White Rock began as a construction camp for non cleared workers at the Laboratory sometime in 1947. The camp was essentially independent of Los Alamos, which meant it required its own school. While the school was called White Rock Elementary, it is very likely that the structure served anyone without another school to attend until much later. In the original master plan for expansion of White Rock in the 1960s, an elementary and a junior high were located just off Sherwood Blvd with a senior high school proposed to be built on the other side of town. None of those plans came to fruition however, and the original White Rock Elementary served students until construction of Pinon Elementary in 1963.

As we come to the end of this post, you might be wondering how we can dive into the history of schools in Los Alamos while barely touching on any of the familiar schools our kids attend today. Well, stay tuned! Perhaps the one thing we don’t appreciate enough is the sheer flexibility of our school district. So many towns with similar isolated locations with variable populations gave up on the notion of being able to educate their young people without the help of larger populations in other towns and cities. Los Alamos has never done that. In spite of some enormous ups and downs in population, resources, and changes in educational trends and requirements nationwide, our schools strive to exceed expectations in every way possible.

So check back next week for more information on schools here in Los Alamos, past and present. And when you’re ready to talk housing in the Los Alamos School District, give me a call. I’m your hometown real estate broker!

Declutter Your World in 2023

January 6, 2023 /

Here we are at the beginning of another New Year. Happy 2023 to all of my friends and neighbors here in Los Alamos. I’m wishing all of you the best of everything for 2023. But as I am trying to remember to put a 23 instead of a 22 in all of my paperwork, I’ve also been doing some thinking about resolutions for the coming year.

Now, I’m not a new year’s resolution person strictly speaking. I believe that statistically, most new year’s resolutions fail by mid to late February. If you look up these statistics, there are all kinds of suggested reasons for this. But the most reasonable one I’ve heard is that a lot of new year’s resolutions are either too grandiose, too non specific, too big of a change all at once, or the person setting the goal simply doesn’t understand the process of making a change.

That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t benefit from taking a look at what we’re doing and striving to make it better in any and every way possible. If you were to Google “real estate market predictions for 2023”, you’d see multiple sources suggesting a slow down in home sales. Most national real estate sources are telling folks that they expect a more than two percent drop in home sales for 2023, which would make this year’s numbers the lowest in 9 years. But it’s important to remember that Los Alamos has so many other unique variables that we don’t necessarily follow national trends.

In fact, the home market here in Los Alamos is rather encouraging. We have continued construction going on in White Rock’s Mirador subdivision. Some of the latest homes they’re building not far from State Road 4 are both spacious and beautiful in their classic Southwestern designs.

The development at Arkansas Place has creaked back into motion with building supplies on site and workers moving full speed ahead. And if you haven’t checked out the new apartment complex going up just below the hospital, you should! It’s going up quickly and will offer spacious modern apartments to help ease the housing crunch.

So many housing projects are underway in Los Alamos!

Towards the end of 2022, I talked about several other potential developments going up around town. None of this suggests that the market here in Los Alamos will be anything other than steady, which is encouraging to all of us. If you already own a home, your house will be likely to retain its value and maybe even show an increase. LANL is still hiring and has plans to continue doing so. We have an incredible amount of community projects happening around town, events to enjoy, and so many outdoor activities to look forward to. 2023 is going to be a great year!

If you’ve already got your dream home, or even if you’re not planning to stay in your current home forever, 2023 might be the year for you to experiment with a few of the other trends sweeping our culture and our country.

The No Spend Challenge

More than a few folks have talked with me about this idea, which can be as complicated or simple as you might like. The idea being to challenge yourself to spend only what you need to pay your bills and cover necessary costs of living. That’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? From a home standpoint, perhaps it would be smart to identify renovation projects or things you would like to change about your current home, and then look for ways to decrease surplus spending on life’s little luxuries.

Challenge yourself to go without Starbucks, or your Friday night wine tasting, or whatever you think you could “give up” for a defined amount of time in order to decrease spending and increase saving. Then, come 2024, hit that remodel with your savings and really bask in the satisfaction of knowing you worked hard to make something happen for you and for your family!

The Great DeClutter Event

Has anyone else noticed the enormous rise in storage facilities? It seems like enormous controlled climate storage facilities are going up everywhere! Homes in other regions are getting bigger, with more storage for the serious increase in the amount of stuff Americans are collecting.

Does your garage or basement look like this?

Here in Los Alamos, we don’t typically have a ton of storage in our homes. Maybe 2023 could be the year to not just declutter the unnecessary stuff you already have, but to stop buying more stuff you don’t need. Try looking around your home and identifying boxes that might be taking up space in your storage area. Look for items you don’t use.

If you haven’t looked in a box for more than six months, experts suggest you honestly don’t need what’s in the box. Gather those boxes and unused items in a space like your garage or your driveway. Open each one and take a quick look to make sure there’s no personal information, papers, documents, etc. Then just put the box or item in the car and donate it. The idea is to put yourself in a position where you don’t have the time, the energy, or the space to go through those boxes and activate any emotional attachments to the items. Sentimentality has its place, but you need room for new memories and experiences. That can’t be done if you’re keeping everything!

Your space COULD look like this!

When it comes to Internet shopping and Amazon in particular, challenge yourself to leave items in your shopping cart for at least 24-48 hrs before you purchase. Don’t impulse buy. Take the money you would’ve spent on things you don’t need and either pay down an existing bill or put it in a savings account. By the end of each month, each quarter, or all of 2023, you might be shocked at the amount of savings you have to apply to something you really, really want and need.

No matter how you decide to challenge yourself for the upcoming year, I hope you find enjoyment and satisfaction in life. And if 2023 is the year you decide to buy or sell real estate in Los Alamos, then give me a call! I’m your hometown real estate broker and I’d love to talk housing in Los Alamos with you.

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