By Kevin Hendricks
Over 200 students, friends, families, educators, legislators and community leaders gathered Wednesday outside of RioTECH, a new high school focused on skilled trades, to celebrate the opening of the Rio Rancho school that has been years in the making.
Among those celebrating the opening was Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who praised the new career and technical education (CTE) initiative in Rio Rancho as a leading example for the nation.
“I don’t go to every opening of every school in every place in the United States of America,” Weingarten said. “But look at this right now, because this is more than a building. It’s more than a building, it’s a launchpad for great family sustaining futures.”
RioTECH, set to open for the 2025-2026 school year, will offer 18 hybrid classrooms and five industry-standard labs, providing pathways in areas such as automotive technology, computer information systems, digital media, plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, wiring and welding. The 70,000-square-foot campus is a joint effort between Rio Rancho Public Schools and Central New Mexico Community College.
Weingarten said that the new facility represents more than just a building—it’s a collaborative effort bringing together high school and higher education, business and political communities to support local students and families.
She also said it showed the importance of community investment.
“This is a game changer for the community, because this is the community investing in itself,” Weingarten said. “This is how a community makes possibility into promise, makes hope into aspiration, makes a sense of believing into a pathway to the future.”
While the event was upbeat, Weingarten warned of potential challenges facing career technical education, with significant federal funding at risk. Approximately $100 billion in federal education resources could be threatened, which could impact programs like career tech education initiatives. Weingarten also raised concerns about potential federal education funding cuts while urging continued support for public school students and warning against diverting resources to private alternatives.
We have fought for a lot of federal resources for career tech ed. We fought for a lot, and all of these things, every one of these things is on the chopping block,” Weingarten said. “Title I is on the chopping block. There’s $100 billion of federal money that goes to places like New Mexico, which is on the chopping block. That money can’t be taken away from public school students and given to billionaires. Billionaires have enough. That money has to go to kids.”
The education community was greatly affected last month when the U.S. Department of Education cut its workforce in half. President Donald Trump then issued an executive order directing U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to work toward shutting down the Education Department “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
Weingarten said New Mexicans should be “very” concerned about these cuts.
“When you say you’re going to get rid of the Department of Education, look, to me, it’s not about the bricks, it’s about the kids,” Weingarten said. “I don’t care about the building. I care about the function. People should be really alarmed, and we should really be focused on making sure that the funding that goes for families, the funding that goes for kids, it can’t be swapped out, can’t be pretended that it’s going to go somewhere else. It still needs to go to kids and to fund these things like this.”