Rio Rancho school board approves next year's instructional calendar

RIO RANCHO — The Rio Rancho Public Schools Board of Education on Monday unanimously approved the instructional calendars for next school year, including the first for RioTECH, a career technical education school that will offer a dual credit program with Central New Mexico Community College starting in August.

The decision came after district officials had said they needed to wait for the legislative session to end before presenting school board members with a final version of the calendars that they could approve. District officials hoped that a bill equalizing the number of professional development days between elementary and secondary schools would become law, but since it did not, teachers are left with the same number of professional development days as before, according to Peggy Johnston, RRPS director of human resources, who briefed board members on Monday. Elementary school teachers will get 10 days of professional development, while secondary school teachers will get just five, she said. However, elementary and secondary school students will not always have the same professional development days off.

The 190-day 2025-26 school year calendar has elementary and secondary school students starting instruction on Aug. 7 and ending for summer on May 29. District officials had to remove Presidents’ Day and the vernal holiday as holidays and replace them with a professional development day, according to Johnston.

Graduation dates are yet to be determined, Johnston said, but those dates will not change the instructional calendar.

She noted that one major difference for teachers next school year is that they will start on Aug. 4 as opposed to July 31. The new start date will commence three days of professional development in the run-up to the Aug. 7 instructional start date, whereas this school year, the start and end of those professional development days intersected with a weekend.

RioTECH Principal Kris Johnson told the board it was difficult to balance the calendar of his new school and CNM, but school officials wanted to “keep true” to RRPS’s school year calendar so it did not create challenges for families.

RioTECH starting instruction on Aug. 7, in contrast to CNM’s Sept. 2 start date, will give the new school “time and flexibility to frontload a lot of the instructional hours for our core classes,” Johnson said.

Both RioTECH and CNM get Nov. 27-28 off for Thanksgiving break. The institutions’ winter breaks vary somewhat, with CNM off Dec. 19 through Jan. 1, 2026, and the RioTECH off Dec. 17 through Jan. 2.

A big difference between the RRPS and RioTECH calendars, Johnson noted, is that the latter institution has no spring break, consistent with CNM’s practices.

“That made it a little bit challenging” to make the district’s and RioTECH’s calendars consistent, Johnson said.

The last day of instruction will be April 26, a full month before RRPS students are released, Johnson said. The last day for teachers, however, will be May 20, the same day as RioTECH’s graduation.

District 5 school board member and secretary Jessica Tyler noted the “extremely difficult balancing act” district officials have in creating the school year calendar.

“Especially when there’s drastic differences in secondary and primary calendars as far as the professional development hours,” Tyler said during the meeting. “I think there’s probably some people feeling like one person has it better than the other, but I would just remind people that you guys definitely do the best that you can.”