LCPS Board of Education appointee running to complete term

Patrick Nolan was appointed to the Las Cruces Public Schools Board of Education in April, following the resignation of Ray Jaramillo as the District 1 board member. Nolan said he will be a candidate in the Nov. 7, 2023, local election to complete the final two years of Jaramillo’s unexpired term.

“As a parent (his daughter is a sophomore at Centennial High School), I love it,” Nolan said of the year-round calendar LCPS adopted in 2022. Along with added days of instruction, it is an important step forward, he said.

Nolan said he would like to see the school district expand and improve access to its after-school programming.

“How do we get organizations on the outside of LCPS to provide more opportunities for students?” he asked.

A good example of what’s working is Organ Mountain-Desert Peaks National Monument, said Nolan, who has been executive director of the nonprofit Friends of Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks (FOMDP) since February 2018.

FOMDP has “a ton of youth programs,” he said, including Moving Montañas program field trips and hikes for fourth graders.

Nolan said LCPS “needs to take a hard look” at bringing school bus service in house. The school district would have “more control, more leverage” if it operated its own bus service rather than continuing to contract it out as it does now, with “problems continuing year after year after year,” he said.

In addition to providing better service to families whose children ride school buses, “bus drivers would be better served as LCPS employees,” Nolan said.

The changeover is not something that could or should be done immediately, he said, but “we need to know we’re ready for the challenge.”

One of his biggest surprises as a board member, Nolan said, has been the length of school board meetings.

The board needs to streamline its meetings, he said, because it is “hard for the general public to sit for five or six hours” for a meeting.

Nolan is a native of Detroit, Michigan.

His mother was a high school teacher in Detroit Public Schools and his father worked in the auto industry, according to Nolan’s LCPS biography.

Because his mother was a teacher in the 1990s when Detroit was struggling, Nolan said, he came to recognize the importance of schools as “maybe the most stable and safest places to be,” he said.

Nolan graduated from the University of Detroit Mercy with a degree in history. He is a former union representative for the American Federation of Teachers New Mexico and is a member of the Las Cruces Green Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors.

Nolan is married to Las Cruces City Councilor Johana Bencomo.