Belen Schools getting ready for new year

BELEN — With the last week of summer break on the horizon, Belen Consolidated Schools is beginning the 2025-26 school year with the focus squarely on student growth.

“Our focus is still going to be on the belief that all students can grow,” said BCS Superintendent Lawrence Sanchez. “In ensuring our students are growing, we’re not so much focusing on proficiency because it’s our belief that if they’re growing, they are going to be proficient.”

Sanchez said the district will be working to identify students who are below proficiency and focusing on their academic growth.

Students can expect some new rules regarding the use of cellphones and other wireless devices during class time this year, thanks to legislation passed by the state during the 2025 legislative session.

Senate Bill 160 requires school districts and charter schools to adopt and implement a policy for the use of wireless communication devices by students by Aug. 1. The Belen Board of Education passed the required policy on wireless devices at its July 8 meeting.

Some reports represented SB160 as an outright ban on devices in classrooms, but that level of regulation has been left to individual districts and charter schools.

“I’m glad the Legislature left it to local control. You can’t say, ‘Don’t tell us to have 180 days. We want local control’ and also say, ‘Oh, but you guys be the bad guys and tell the parents (their students) can’t have cell phones,’” said the superintendent.

Sanchez said while the district policy is in place, the rules and regulations are still being developed and finalized by administrators and site principals. The most likely scenario will be two sets of regulations — one for elementary and one for secondary students — due to the difference in ages, he said.

“But they will be very similar,” Sanchez said. “The goal is to have the final regulations in place before classes begin.”

The district’s policy specifies school site rules cannot prohibit students from using wireless devices for disability accessibility, as part of a medical necessity, if it is part of a student’s Individual Education Plan or for educational reasons as determined by the teacher or principal.

If a student breaks the site rules, the policy states the device could be confiscated but school officials are not allowed to search the device’s contents without “reasonable suspicion that a search will reveal evidence of a violation of school rules or the law …”

This academic year marks the beginning of new high school graduation requirements across the state, including the ability for districts to include two courses deemed critical by local boards of education. The Belen board chose financial literacy and college and career exploration as the two classes required for students to graduate from Belen and Infinity high schools.

Sanchez said those classes and the other new requirements won’t be immediate priorities for entering freshmen, but will require them to look at their high school career in the long term.

“That is difficult because students that age … often have a hard time seeing that far into the future,” Sanchez said. “If we can keep them on track through their freshman year, you have an easier chance of getting them to graduation.”

In the Belen district, the financial literacy course won’t be an option until senior year and the college and career exploration is credit that can be earned over a period of four years.

“Freshmen need to know that if they wait until their senior year to start working on their college and career exploration credit, they probably aren’t going to make it,” the superintendent said. “They will have bypassed a lot of opportunities, which are essentially just showing up for events and activities like the Eagle Expo. This is about 180 hours of work and if you’re scrambling around at the last minute, it’s not going to go well.”

The concept of the college and career exploration credit is to have students take advantage of various opportunities offered through the high schools such as career expos, job shadowing, work-based learning and career technical education in order to explore the variety of options available to them after high school.

Progress on the construction of the new Dennis Chavez Elementary in Los Chavez on N.M. 314 will continue throughout this academic year with the new school scheduled to be open for the 2026-27 school year.