Los Lunas Schools focus on attendance and growth as new campus opens

Peralta Elementary School was complete, inside and out, and ready for an open house on Friday, July 31, 2025, as attendance remains central to Los Lunas Schools’ planning. The campus is part of a system that serves Bosque Farms, El Cerro, Highland Meadows, Peralta, Valencia, Tome, Los Lunas and surrounding areas, where new seats and stable attendance both shape what families expect from local schools.

Los Lunas Schools posts construction and facility updates on its construction page, and the district’s attendance plan ties local practice to the New Mexico Attendance for Success Act. Attendance sits inside the district’s accountability framework, alongside the district report card and the attendance-for-success section that families can use to follow performance.

In school year 2023-24, the New Mexico Children’s Cabinet put chronic absenteeism at 29.77% statewide, down from 40.73% in 2021-22. In 2024, Source New Mexico put the state’s chronic absenteeism increase at 119% between 2019 and 2023, the largest in the country. A 2018 brief from the New Mexico Legislative Education Study Committee distinguishes chronic absenteeism from habitual truancy and ties it to student success.

At Peralta, growth means classrooms, staffing and bus routes have to keep pace as families spread across a district that reaches from Los Lunas to Tome and Peralta. Niche ranks Peralta Elementary as a PK-6 public school in Los Lunas and No. 2 among the best public elementary schools in Valencia County.