The Santa Fe Girls' School

Who We Are

Mission: The Santa Fe Girls’ School’s mission is to foster intellectual growth and emotional strength in adolescent girls, preparing them for the demands of high school, college and young adulthood.

History: The Santa Fe Girls’ School was founded in 1998 in response to the community’s need for an academic setting where adolescent girls from all economic and cultural backgrounds could learn in an environment that supports emotional growth and intellectual strength.

The Santa Fe Girls’ School offers 6th, 7th and 8th grades to students who primarily come from public elementary schools. The graduates generally return to public schools in the 9th grade.

The School began with fifteen students in a small, rented building in downtown Santa Fe. With community support and the hard work of the Board of Trustees and the staff, the Santa Fe Girls’ School raised enough money to purchase and renovate a building on West Zia Road. Classes began at the new facility in September of 2002 with an enrollment of twenty-seven students.

The Santa Fe Girls’ School now has seven classes of graduates in both public and private high schools and college. Most alumnae are enrolled in honors classes and all are serious, independent thinkers and successful learners. The first graduating class entered college in Fall of 2005. Graduates selected Smith College, Cornell University, American University and the University of New Mexico.

Educational Philosophy: At The Santa Fe Girls’ School, learning is a dynamic, open-ended and very personal process that requires and encourages dialogue and the exchange of ideas among students and teachers.

Students who have the opportunity to develop a personal and trusting relationship with their teachers feel comfortable in sharing their “world view”. This “world view” is how the student perceives, organizes and internalizes information.

As the students share their ideas, teachers discover what experiences and cultural influences have come together to form each student’s perspective. Teachers can use this knowledge about their students to purposefully weave threads into the learning process that students can recognize and relate to their own experiences. This recognition leads to the student making a personal connection to the information. The student can then apply her knowledge to the challenge of new concepts, which fosters empowerment and a life-long love of learning.