Red Rock pupils will attend Miyamura

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — All pupils who now attend Red Rock Elementary School will be going to Miyamura High School after all.

Gallup-McKinley County school officials had announced earlier this year that with the establishment of a second high school in the district — Miyamura — the district set up boundaries to establish which pupils would be going to which school.

In order to keep the two schools about the same size, the boundary divided the district into two halves, but the boundary went through the middle of the Red Rock School district, which meant that half of the pupils who went to Red Rock would go to Miyamura and the other half to Gallup High School after completing three years at Gallup Middle School.

This raised a number of complaints from parents of pupils who were going to Red Rock. They said that it was not fair that their children would not be going to the same high school as some of the friends they made in elementary school.

The district’s new superintendent, Ray Arsenault, said he looked into this situation when he came on board and had no problem deciding to change the boundaries to allow Red Rock pupils to all go to the same high school.

“In my 40 years as an educator, I have never seen an elementary school district divided in half like this,” he said.
He said he was also crunching numbers and didn’t think this decision will result in one high school — Miyamura — being significantly larger than the other one.

“We going to be having expansion going on in the west,” he said, adding that as a result, the difference between the two school enrollments will probably be less than 30 students.

This change will not affect the boundaries already set for the two high schools as well as for the three middle schools. The district plans to publish new attendance boundary lines and bus routes for the two high schools in the near future.