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While the United States aims to become carbon neutral by 2050, Western New Mexico University has set a more ambitious goal: to be carbon neutral by 2030. Many of the initiatives that will be needed to achieve this goal are well underway. At present, approximately 50% of the energy the university uses comes from carbon-neutral sources. The greatest single source of this energy is a solar farm operated by PNM’s Community Solar Direct program, located on the Jicarilla Apache Nation in northern New Mexico. According to Vice President of Facilities and Operations Kevin Matthes, WNMU currently receives one megawatt of electricity from this farm, which is enough to satisfy approximately one-third of the university’s energy needs. WNMU also generates solar power on campus. In 2022, the university added a parking structure with photovoltaic panels next to the Fine Arts Center Theatre, and this summer, additional panels were added near the WNMU Museum. These on-campus panels provide...

After years as a teacher, head basketball coach, assistant principal, principal, educational consultant and eventually as a superintendent in three different states, Assistant Professor Robert Neu found his way to WNMU, where he is teaching in and leading the Educational Leadership Program. While he has only been at WNMU since last January, Neu has already been instrumental in revamping the program’s curriculum to center it on “futures literacy.” Futures literacy is “the skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do,” according to the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). “Being futures literate,” says UNESCO, “empowers the imagination, enhances our ability to prepare, recover and invent as changes occur.” Neu provided an example from recent history to explain the concept further. “When you think about the pandemic,” he said, “no one was prepared for that. But those that...

Members the Western New Mexico University Board of Regents presented their evaluation of university president Dr. Joseph Shepard for the ’23 fiscal year and rated his performance as excellent, meeting the conditions of a retention bonus stipulated in President Shepard’s contract, Friday. “We as a board recognized outstanding performances in all areas,” said Regent Dal Moellenberg with Regent Vice President Lyndon Haviland adding, “We have concluded that President Shepard has had an excellent year.” Noting the evaluation of the university’s president each year is tied to the strategic plan, the board also passed a new set of goals and objectives tied to the university’s new strategic plan, created through a process that included university-wide collaboration and input from the public. In his report, President Shepard provided fall enrollment projections remarking the university’s 4K Initiative continues to move forward. “The university continues to...

Western New Mexico University hosted the New Mexico Basic Economic Development Course on July 16 – 20. The course was open to municipal and county managers and department directors, tribal leaders, community planners and developers, and others interested in community job creation in New Mexico. Accredited by the International Economic Development Council based in Washington, D.C., the course provides one week of intensive training on how to select the right combination of strategies to cost-effectively create jobs in New Mexican communities. It is intended for “practitioners and community leaders committed to building healthy and resilient economies at the local and regional levels,” according to the program’s website. The Basic Economic Development Course features faculty that share their professional experiences and introduce participants to academic theories about economic development. The course began in 1992 as a partnership between Western New Mexico University and...

Going to college was not a priority for Margarita Telles until her young niece starting asking her about it. Telles, a resident of Las Cruces, has been working with her mother to raise her niece, who is now nine years old. Inspired by her niece’s questions and encouragement, Telles enrolled as a Psychology major at Western New Mexico University, where she has been completing her coursework online. Her academic career at WNMU was capped this spring when she learned she was the first-prize winner in this year’s Academic Writing Contest. Telles’ award-winning paper, “The Adverse Effects of Parent-Child Loss or Separation: A Literature Review,” was written for her senior seminar class and nominated for the award by Associate Professor Jennifer Johnston. In it, she reviews recent studies that have considered the psychological and physiological effects when a child loses contact with a caregiver. Her project was inspired by her interest in psychological parenting, a form of...

The Silver City CLAY Festival is an annual event held every July since 2011, but this year’s festival looked different from previous years’, with many of the events taking place on the WNMU campus, July 10-16. The university is one of the major sponsors of the festival. The festival brought together artists, educators, families and collectors for a week of activities and exhibitions that explored and celebrated clay. Participants had an opportunity to take part in hands-on workshops with prominent clay artists, and children were welcomed to WNMU Museum as well as the Silver City Museum, where they had a chance to participate in clay-based activities. Demonstrations, lectures, exhibitions and gallery talks were held throughout the week, and the festival concluded with a ceramic-glaze-inspired brunch at Bear Mountain Lodge. Headlining the event this year was WNMU Visiting Artist George Rodriguez. Rodriguez, a sculptor whose work addresses themes of culture and community,...

WNMU Assistant Professor Heather Frankland is publishing a new chapbook of poetry, soon to be released by Finishing Line Press, a widely respected publisher in literary circles. The chapbook, “Midwest Musings,” collects together poems completed recently as well as some from earlier in Frankland’s career that she has since revised. The chapbook came together as Frankland, a native of Muncie, Indiana, reflected on the connections between her various poems.  “I realized I had a lot of poems that were interrogating the Midwest, family, loss, and identity,” she said, “I had never put all together before, but when I did, I realized that there was a theme that was running through them.” This new collection, Frankland said, is about “identity, regionality, and connections to land and landscape.”  She uses an analogy about fruit from a farmer’s market to describe the relationship between her poetry and place. “If you buy fruit from the farmer’s market,”...

History teacher Amy Page, who earned her MA in Interdisciplinary Studies at WNMU in 2016, is well familiar with awards. Serving at Moriarty High School, she has been named New Mexico’s National History Day Teacher of the Year multiple times, and she attended WNMU as a James Madison Memorial Foundation Fellow, the most prestigious fellowship in the country for secondary teachers in constitutional history and government. Most recently, she spent a week as a fellow at the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes in Kansas, which allowed her to work with the organization’s staff as well as other nationally celebrated teachers to explore new approaches in project-based learning. This kind of experiential, project-based learning is what Page is passionate about, and her success in applying this approach in the classroom has earned her national acclaim.  Over the years, she has taken over 80 teams of students to the National History Day competition, and they have won numerous awards...

WNMU will begin enrolling graduate students in its Master of Science in Nursing in Community and Rural/Frontier Health program starting fall 2023. All of the classes in the program will be taught online, making the program available to working nurses across the nation. Students will be able to begin their coursework in any semester and complete their clinical work in their own communities.  Graduates from the program will emerge prepared to become Family Nurse Practitioners. This newly relaunched program is the only one in New Mexico and one of very few in the United States to focus on community and rural/frontier care. Health care providers in this field are in very high demand, not only in New Mexico, but in other states with large rural populations. The online program at WNMU is designed to help satisfy the need for more health care providers in underserved communities. Required coursework for the degree can be completed in as little as one year. In addition, the program...

Kathryn Sanchez has long known that she wanted a career devoted to helping others. But the path toward that career has not always been straightforward for the Silver City native. When Sanchez started at WNMU as a young adult, her “heart wasn’t in it,” she said. After taking time away from higher education to work as a title clerk and to start a family, she decided to return to the university to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Social Work. Now, she has not only accomplished that, but she is in her second year of the master’s program in Social Work at WNMU. Her desire to work in the field was prompted by her experience with grief counseling as a teenager and it was strengthened by her observations as an adult. “While working I longed to return to school to earn my degree,” she said, “and was truly led to social work after witnessing the foster-adopt process my mom went through in achieving guardianship of a friend's daughter, after tragically passed...