Dr. Lillian Torrez honored after 44 years of service in education

“Students mean everything to me, and that’s kind of how I’ve been my whole career,” she said, speaking last month in her office on Camino de La Placita in Taos. “That’s where I found my passion. I see myself in them.”

Transforming a district

Dr. Torrez, 67, retired at the end of August after eight years as superintendent for Taos Municipal Schools, which includes Taos High School, Taos Middle School, Enos Garcia Elementary, Ranchos Elementary School, Arroyos del Norte Elementary, Taos Cyber Magnet School and the Taos Tiger Connect K-12 Online Academy. The district also authorizes Taos Charter School and Taos Academy.

Taos Municipal Schools serves more than 2,000 students every year, and like Torrez was, many of them are being raised by their grandparents — including as many as 50 percent of students at Enos Garcia Elementary, Torrez estimates.

Today, Taos Municipal Schools maintains its budget, keeps an ample cash reserve and has access to several million dollars from more than 50 grants. The district is in good standing with the New Mexico Public Education Department, has a high percentage of National Board Certification teachers, and maintains close relationships with local nonprofits like LOR Foundation, J3 Fund and Taos Community Foundation. The district has a robust and growing set of programs, including ones to help prevent teen pregnancy, address youth homelessness and provide fresh fruits and vegetables to students.

While Torrez said the district is still dealing with “learning loss” from classroom closures during the pandemic, she and her staff secured mobile hotspots through Kit Carson Electric for students without internet access. Earlier this year, the district gave out 1,200 new Chromebooks to students.

But when Torrez came onboard in 2014, the district had few of those assets and was rife with problems — $400,000 in debt to the New Mexico Public Education Department for food service costs, numerous staff complaints and several pending lawsuits. The situation became so dire, Torrez said, that PED sent a compliance officer to investigate Taos Municipal Schools, one of the first signs that the state is preparing to take over a failing district.

“We had no money. This district was completely broke,” Torrez said. “I had to, by attrition, let 38 people go. There were so many things to be fixed, but the directors that I hired were very hardworking — committed. The principals that we had, everybody was so supportive and would just ask what was needed.”

At Torrez’s urging, top-level staff with the district pulled many late nights after she came onboard to strategize how to stabilize the district. “Sometimes I would say, ‘We’re not going anywhere. We’re having pizzas ordered in for the next two weeks. Every night. You’re going to be putting more hours in than you have been putting in in your entire life. Can you guys do that?’ ‘Yes.’ That’s what we had to do. We had to take it one step at a time,” Torrez said.

Four decades in education

Before Taos, Torrez spent 40 years working in schools with similar problems throughout the state — as a special ed teacher, counselor, assistant principal and, eventually, returned to Albuquerque in 1996 to become principal at Eugene Field Elementary, a bilingual, “high-risk,” high-poverty school.

There, Torrez worked with staff to establish programs that resemble what is now known as a “community school” model, where meeting the needs of students means ensuring they have food security, clothing and supplies — that their basic needs are met and that their families take part in the school they attend.

“The parents would go out and sell pickles,” Torrez recalls of their program at Eugene Field. “Everyone was into pickles then, and they had a pot that was helping with the school. We had a daycare, and the rule was that every parent was required to help two weeks out of the whole year. If you were a parent, you were going to have to help. Many of the parents had so many kids that they had to keep their kids in the daycare, but they had to then put in time working with teachers — being an assistant, things like that.”

Over the next seven years, the school overcame a 20-year history of poor performance records with PED, raising student academic performance from 13 percent to nearly 50 percent. Before she left in 2002, Torrez was honored as teacher of the year by the Albuquerque Public Schools district.

From there, Torrez worked at St. Pius High School as an administrator and Cuba Independent Schools as assistant superintendent. In 2012, she took the job of superintendent at Questa Independent Schools, where she oversaw a 13 percent increase in graduation rates in Questa and helped attract new funding from the village and the state before she joined Taos Municipal Schools in 2014.

What comes next

In Taos, Torrez said her experiences coalesced to help her lead the district out of a set of problems, which, while familiar, seemed nearly impossible to overcome when she joined the district.

“She’s highly motivated. She’s highly dedicated. She’s always thinking about the students,” said Valerie Trujillo, who moved from assistant superintendent into the role of interim superintendent following Torrez’s retirement. “She has a lot of enthusiasm and high energy. She works a lot. Definitely she has been committed to the district. Tenures for superintendents are around two years, if that, and she lasted eight years here, and I think that’s commendable. She recently got the Dr. Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award, and it was all about serving the underserved population, focusing on poverty and so forth. She’s also from the executive board [member] of the AASA (American Association of School Administrators), and with that position she mentors superintendents or aspiring superintendents or principals across the nation.”

Trujillo says she knows that she and her staff still have a lot of work ahead of them, but they plan to tackle it following a similar model of incremental improvement, particularly where it comes to pandemic-related learning loss, math and English learning and school safety concerns in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting this past spring.

“Most importantly, we are working on our ready-access doors, where there is a camera, like a buzz door, so they can see who is at the front doors, those single-entry doors, which none of our campuses currently have,” Trujillo said. “We have also just hired a safety coordinator who has a law enforcement background.”

In retirement, Torrez is taking the sort of vacation she hasn’t been able to in 44 years — spending a month traveling across Europe. When she returns, she plans to focus on her family — including her two children, four grandchildren and her sister, Susan Raymond, who was recently diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.

“It just feels like time. My family needs me,” Torrez said. “I know that it’s been rough on my two children. They say, ‘Mom, why do you keep on and on. You’re not paying attention to us, your four grandchildren.’ ‘OK, give me another year — just one more year, just one more year,’ I’d say. They don’t even believe I’m retiring. They think I’ll rescind it by next week.”