Bid out for new school in San Jon, NM: $40 million with total enrollment of about 120 students

04.21.2026

The Rio Grande Foundation has been highlighting the challenge facing New Mexico with regard to the State’s loss of young people. The largest district (APS) has lost 27,000 students in the past 15 years. If the situation is bad in urban areas one can only imagine what rural communities are dealing with. We only need to look as far as San Jon’s planned new school building for details. San Jon is on the Texas border off I-40.

According to the article linked above the District is currently looking to build a brand new 55,000 sq ft school building for District’s 112 students from prekindergarten through 12th grade. This is obviously an extremely rural community with very little in the way of population or jobs. Notably, the article notes that the District went from 117 students last year to 112 this year. That may sound like a trivial decline, but it is a drop of 4.7% in a single year. We found data from 2014-2015 showing the district had a student population of 145. That’s a 23% drop in 11 years.

This is NOT to “pick on” San Jon schools or even to say that they shouldn’t have a new building. Of course, one wonders why New Mexico needs 89 school districts (not including charter schools). The fact that the money for this project is coming from the State, not local resources is one serious issue. As long as local districts receive such subsidies from the state (courtesy of the oil and gas industry) they don’t need to concern themselves with building a local economy to pay for things like schools.

Usually this is the point where we propose some solutions, but it’s not an easy situation.

  • New Mexico clearly has too many school districts;
  • Our student population is plummeting especially in the non-oil and gas rural areas;
  • Our education funding formula and concentration of $$ in Santa Fe creates political incentives to
  • Our school construction costs are very expensive due to everything from lack of modular building plans to LEED design and Davis-Bacon rules;
  • Innovative solutions are necessary, but New Mexico’s politicians have no interest in addressing the situation when oil and gas money keeps flowing.