01-06-2025
Mosquero Municipal Schools sees teacher housing as solution to rural woes
MOSQUERO — Eastward beyond the Sangre de Cristo Mountains lies a seemingly infinite spread of pasture, broken up only by the occasional ranch along the roadside.
It's a view common throughout Harding County, the least populated county in the state, with around 750 people and 50,000 head of cattle, according to locals, many of whom who take pride in the remote area's rural lifestyle.
But there's a drawback to that bucolic expanse.
The lack of housing spells long commutes for teachers and students and creates difficulties in recruiting and retaining educators, compounding struggles small public school districts long have faced. Officials argue their operational costs are far higher per student than their urban counterparts.
New Mexico lawmakers on the Legislative Finance Committee visited the village of Mosquero in mid-May to hear from school leaders in rural communities about their unique challenges and how a state-funded teacher housing project underway at Mosquero Municipal Schools helps in a county like Harding — with no rental properties listed online and just a few houses listed for sale.
Though, a lack of affordable housing for staff isn't just a problem in remote towns like Mosquero, whose district serves 50 students who attend in person. Educators nationwide struggle to afford to live where they work, leading many districts to develop housing projects in an effort to combat teacher shortages.
Some rural public school districts across New Mexico, including Mosquero, have seen state money roll in to develop similar projects, thanks to the Teacher Housing Pilot Program and other initiatives launched in recent years. The pilot program is focused on remote villages and tribal communities with insufficient housing within 10 miles.
Roy Municipal Schools has taken notice of the effort in nearby Mosquero and is considering such a project, an official said in a recent interview.
Others districts have found alternate funding sources to build teacher housing. The Pojoaque Valley School District, for instance, secured federal funding for a project in the works.
Even Santa Fe Public Schools has discussed the possibility of teacher housing in an effort to ease the high cost of living for staff. The local district secured some state capital outlay funds to start the process but remains a long way from the estimated $15 million needed to build a housing complex.
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Santiago Zamora sands drywall for the teacher housing project in the village of Mosquero in Harding County.
Building a housing supply
Johnna Bruhn, superintendent of Mosquero Municipal Schools, applied to the state's Teacher Housing Pilot Program and received almost $3 million to build 10 small houses — five now nearing completion. The project is meant to attract new teachers to fill two vacancies and house current staff who commute long distances due to a lack of nearby housing.
The district has 11 certified teachers in prekindergarten to grade 12, and it employs 24 total staff.
'We try to cover for one another. But when you're as small as we are, you kind of need everyone to be present,' Bruhn said. Like a few other school staff, she lives outside the village, more than a 40-minute drive away in Logan — though her 'heart is in Mosquero.'
Mosquero map
She's set to be one of a handful of staff members to move into the new units, with around five reserved for new hires. Teachers living in the units will pay rent on a sliding scale relative to their pay — to their landlord and employer, the school district. Specific contracts for rent amounts have not yet been determined, Bruhn said.
Gallup-McKinley County Schools, which stretched across 5,000 square miles, also has benefited from the pilot program. It received funding for several housing projects, one of which created 16 two-bedroom units as a means of reducing teachers' commutes, according to information from the developer.
The Pojoaque Valley School District received $750,000 in federal funds in 2023 to build teacher housing, aided by efforts of U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M.
The Central Consolidated School District built 15 housing units in Shiprock in 2022 using state funds.
On a visit to those units in Shiprock, the New Mexico Public School Facilities Authority named the units as a model for state, according to a news release from the district. A separate release cited a tour by Ryan Parks, an official with the agency, who said he was impressed with the initiative and the district's work.
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Kristian Tarango seals the foundation of a prefabricated home Tuesday for a project to build 10 rental units for teacher housing in the village of Mosquero.
Officials at the agency and several school districts with active or completed housing developments did not return calls to comment on the projects.
Bruhn said many small rural districts lack the 'administrative expertise' to manage and apply for large-scale capital projects like Mosquero's.
Having previously worked for the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, Bruhn said her familiarity with government processes helped — but navigating the byzantine software and construction landscape still proved challenging. She called on the state to assign a 'funding expert' for smaller districts' capital projects.
Another obstacle, she said, was the cost of bringing contractors to such remote areas — often two hours or more from Albuquerque or Santa Fe. That's partly why Mosquero opted for prefabricated homes built in Albuquerque, which she said came at half the cost of building on-site, according to estimates.
Few students, more problems
Bruhn had more to talk about with lawmakers than housing. Sitting under the chartreuse tint of the school gymnasium, she spoke about the myriad of ways 'micro-districts' like hers, with 200 or fewer students enrolled, are facing unique rural challenges — and how housing is just a piece of a complex puzzle.
'You can't go to a textbook company and say, 'I want two textbooks,' ' she said. 'So it's the issue of scale that absolutely kills you.'
Bruhn instead suggested lawmakers fund micro-districts as if they had a baseline level of 100 students, a panacea not for inefficiency, she noted, but to help offset high per-student operational costs.
Micro-districts like Mosquero are funded more per student than the state average — $26,100 per student compared to $13,900 statewide in fiscal year 2025, according to a brief from the Legislative Finance Committee.
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Construction underway on teacher housing Tuesday in Mosquero.
The report credited that increase to legislative adjustments to the state's school funding formula in 2015 and 2020 to increase funding for small and rural districts — changes the brief notes helped wean micro-districts off emergency supplemental funding they had 'chronically' relied on.
Although micro-districts might have only a few special education students, Bruhn noted as an example, they still require the entire framework of specialized supports and dedicated spaces mandated by state and federal law — a burden larger districts can absorb more easily.
Sitting behind Bruhn in the audience were administrators from other rural micro-districts.
Alan Umholtz, superintendent of San Jon Schools, said Bruhn laid out many of the issues his district also has faced. He underscored a point she had made about transportation in rural districts, echoing the need for state-funded alternatives like SUVs.
'Electric buses — you can't drive those on the roads [in San Jon] because they're just gravel,' he said, noting his buses often run with only a few students due to multiple far-reaching routes.
'Play to your strengths'
The state legislators' trip to Mosquero was part of a three-day tour of rural New Mexico that ended in Tucumcari. It was organized by Rep. Jack Chatfield, a Mosquero Republican who brought his colleagues to witness the challenges and advantages of rural life.
'What they need to understand is it's a remote area. You're not gonna go to Walmart every evening,' Chatfield said during a tour of school facilities. 'You have to play to your strengths. And our strength is a good education and a strong community.'
The Mosquero district has made a commitment to 'leverage career technical education to boost student outcomes,' Bruhn said.
It offers intensive career pathways across a variety of fields and allows students to find ways to support the local community with their personal passions — small businesses that have sprung up to fill gaps. Among them: a coffee shop, a county newspaper and a tire shop started by a former student who is now in an auto mechanic program in Wyoming.
'It's a long way for community members to go to have particular services dealt with,' Bruhn said. 'So we try to ask: 'What can we train our students to do that they'd otherwise need to drive elsewhere for?' '
She added, 'I guess I should get a count on how many tires were fixed this year. I don't have it, but it was quite a few for our little community. That's the beauty of being so small — we can tailor things at the student level instead of just the classroom level.'
The school district also boasts an equestrian center, a sprawling indoor arena for a range of uses. It's used as a space for developing rodeo skills like roping — which Bruhn's husband and son volunteer to teach.
The arena has other career education uses, serving as a pathway for event management. Classes for culinary education and meat processing are planned in classroom modules with a window to the arena.
It's reflective of the make-do attitude in the close-knit village, where many community members take on a variety of roles and older students often step in to read to children in pre-K classrooms.
Victor 'Ray' Vigil, who serves as both mayor of Mosquero and school board president — a role previously held by Chatfield — said, 'It's harder for students to fall by the wayside' in such a small community.
He noted the boys basketball team was showered with community support, despite regularly 'getting their teeth kicked in,' with losses like 80-2.
'But when our kids scored that bucket, you thought they just won the state championship,' Vigil said. 'Because people went to support 'em. They're here for the kids.'
