The Santa Teresa Middle School’s vision is Striving Toward Mastering Standards. The mission is to create and maintain an environment and system of support that ensures that every member of the learning community reaches a high level of academic achievement as determined by state and national standards.

PAL program – Program for Acquiring Language: This program is a “school within a school” for newcomers or recent immigrant students. The PAL students are not isolated and are able to participate in all programs such as art and sports. The goal of the program is intensive literacy instruction for English learners so they can be mainstreamed in all content classes before they attend high school. Principal Rosa Lovelace encourages parents new to New Mexico to enroll their child in the PAL program “so we don’t lose kids” and we accelerate their learning in English and in Spanish.”

All teachers at Santa Teresa Middle School have a TESOL or Bilingual Endorsement. There is minimal teacher turnover since teachers report that they “want to be here at STMS.” Santa Teresa Middle School received a school grade of A. Ninety-two percent (92%) of English learners achieved proficiency in Reading and 74% in Math!