Kendra Ruminer's Two Cents of Real Estate

Take A Peek At Los Alamos, New Mexico

Tag: Los Alamos Public Schools

Last Blast from our Educational Past

February 4, 2023 /

In my last two posts, we’ve been looking back at the development of educational facilities here in Los Alamos. In the last few years we have seen the addition of a beautiful new field house for our high school sports teams as well as the renovation and reconstruction of multiple schools in our district. But how did a small town built quite literally at the end of the road create facilities to educate a population from Kindergarten through 12th Grade? After all, it isn’t unusual for small towns to offer elementary education and then ship kids to a larger, neighboring town for high school.

Anchor High School

At the midpoint of the 1943-44 school year, an eight room school building was constructed west of the current Mesa Public Library location. It was initially called Los Alamos School and included space for all grades. From 1944 to 1945 high school students attending Los Alamos School were said to attend Anchor High School. In 1945 the name was changed to High School Alpha. Craig Martin suggests in his research that this was due to a need to “make it less identifiable to the outside world”.

While this might seem odd to some of us. The Anchor Ranch area is now TA-8. The ranch was taken over by the Manhattan Project in 1943 and eventually became the Anchor Ranch Proving Ground. Prior to that, the homestead had been established in 1901 and was eventually purchased by a family from New York who hired a man to run the ranch and care for a handicapped son who had been sent to live there. Any mention of Anchor High School might well have given away the location of then Project Y. Can you imagine what maintaining secrecy with high schoolers would have been like if they had social media in those days?

Los Alamos School became Central School in appx 1947

You might recall that it was only in the post war time that the Atomic Energy Commission decided to keep Los Alamos and develop it into a research town of sorts. To support a growing population, the AEC began building schools. You can read more about the development of elementary schools HERE. But Los Alamos School didn’t become Central School until Mesa and Canyon Elementary Schools were built in the late 1940s. Students from grades 7-12 remained at Central School until secondary schools could be constructed.

Pueblo Junior High

You probably know the first Junior High School here in Los Alamos as Pueblo Complex. It’s been Pueblo Complex since its closure in 1984 due to a population decline. Sports teams have continued to use its terraced fields and offices occupy old classrooms. The sprawling building also houses High Flyers Gymnastics, LAHS Cheer, and NJROTC physical training and drill team. From its construction in the school building boom of 1947-1949 until the closure in 1984, it was the first “middle school” here in Los Alamos. At that time, Junior High included 7th, 8th, and 9th grades. After that, students moved on to the high school. Some newcomers to the area find it strange that here in Los Alamos we have never included 6th grade in middle school or junior high as they do in many other districts. Who knows, that might be a wave of the future here in Los Alamos as our population continues to grow.

This might be the part most easily seen from Diamond Drive, but the school building is actually enormous!

Cumbres Junior High

If you don’t remember, the current Los Alamos Middle School began life as Cumbres Junior High in 1962. Cumbres Junior High also hosted grades 7-9 and was one of the last schools built prior to the AEC turning over control of the schools to LAPS. The school was built on the site of an old Army Radio Post which was placed on the highest point atop the mesa. Cumbres means “summit” in Spanish, a name that makes sense when you view it like that. The school district currently owns the site of the middle school and the open tract of land between the Ball Fields and the school which has so recently been a topic of conversation here in town.

LAMS Before…

When district enrollment dipped in the early 1980s, LAPS made the decision to keep the newer Junior High Building in operation. Absorbing the students attending Pueblo Junior High must have been quite a task! This was partly accomplished by sending ninth graders to the high school. Both Junior Highs were officially “closed” and Los Alamos Middle School was “opened”. Since the eighties, the middle school has been renovated again into a multi story structure to serve the growing needs of our community.

LAMS Now…

Los Alamos High School

As with anything here in Los Alamos, we have to consider any dates we find on the Internet regarding the beginnings of our town more than a little approximate. If you search on Wikipedia for the year in which Los Alamos High School was founded, it says 1946. It’s a year that isn’t even backed up entirely by the description and history they have of our school.

This is how I remember it! The building in the center of the photo was the main office. Library on the right and Civic Auditorium on the left out of sight.

As I said above, Anchor High School began in the 1943-44 school year. While it went through two name changes and several buildings, it was the beginning of our high school here in Los Alamos. The first official high school building was built in 1949. This is when the high school students moved from Central School/High School Alpha to their new building. In 2010 construction began on the current facility, which is a stunning building with plenty of amenities to offer state of the art learning.

A view of a remaining part of the old E Wing building from the new building.
Back in the day this would have been a view from E Wing toward the main building. Almost reverse from the photo above!

To be honest, its almost mind bending for some of us LAHS alumni to enter the new facility. For one thing, the library entrance looks rather the same, but from an entirely wrong perspective. It’s disorienting in some cases because in the old building, the library was unattached except by covered walkway. For those of you who never walked the halls in the old days and for those of us who try to understand how the new works with the old parts still remaining, you might enjoy the photo below. fbt Architects includes this on their website. You might want to take a look at their photo gallery and read the wonderful write up they provide about the project.

There is absolutely no doubt that the schools here in Los Alamos are a big part of what makes this a great community for families raising children. In my first paragraph I posed a question about how such a small and even secret community ever managed to develop such a district. Truthfully, the answer lies mostly with the Atomic Energy Commission and later the Department of Energy. In the early days and on to modern times. As late as the 2008-2009 school year, 22% of the school district’s budget came from DOE. Prior to that, AEC and later DOE subsidies covered a third of the district’s budget. Regardless of how we might feel about this, the fact remains that it is a key part of the development of such a wonderful learning environment for our kids.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip down the educational memory lane. It’s been educational and fascinating for me as well! I love Los Alamos and I’m proud to be part of the LAHS alumni and your hometown real estate broker! Give me a call and let’s talk real estate in Los Alamos. Whether you’re buying or selling, I’d love to hear from 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!

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