New Mexico Funding for Innovative Staffing Strategies
Invitation to include Opportunity Culture® teaching teams in your December 2025 RFI response
Urgent Deadline: December 23, 2025 NM PED Request for Information to Apply for Funding/Support
New Mexico’s Public Education Reform Fund (PERF) will begin providing funding and support for districts and charter schools to design and implement innovative staffing models. According to this presentation to the Legislative Education Study Committee on October 15, 2025, the Opportunity Culture® model is the only option designated as “research-based.”
Carlsbad Municipal Schools began using Opportunity Culture models in 2022, leading to multiple top-10 rankings for 2024–25 student outcomes, reduced vacancies, and strong educators satisfaction. (Listen to a podcast with the superintendent.)
NMPED has issued a Request for Information (RFI) from New Mexico districts and charter schools interested in partnering with its selected vendors to design, support, and coordinate the deployment of an innovative staffing model.
Next Steps for Interested Districts and Charter Schools
Immediately: Review the Request for Information (RFI)
By December 23, 2025, 5:00 pm: Submit your response to the RFI
If your district would like to cite Opportunity Culture design as its planned innovative staffing model in response to question 1 of the RFI, we welcome you to use a version of the description below, which we prepared to save you time:
In Opportunity Culture designs, a group of teachers and administrators determines how to use the Multi-Classroom Leader role and other teaching team roles to reach all students with excellent teaching and small-group instruction. Each teacher in the Multi-Classroom Leader role leads a small teaching team, providing guidance and frequent on-the-job coaching while continuing to teach, often by leading small-group instruction. Accountable for the results of all students in the team, these team leaders earn supplements averaging 20 percent of teacher pay, within the regular school budget.
How do Opportunity Culture models improve teacher retention and student outcomes?
Extra Months of Learning Each Year*
Research-proven
Third-party studies show that, in reading and math among students directly taught by these teams, students gained an extra 2–7 months of learning above comparable students each year, or an average of +4.5 extra months in a nine-month school year.
% Consistent Teacher-Leader Approval
Educator-endorsed
97–99% of educators in the Multi-Classroom Leader® role and more than 90% of educators in all Opportunity Culture® roles consistently report wanting these roles to continue in their schools, according to a decade of anonymous survey results.
Additional Resources
More on the Opportunity Culture strategy
Learn how these innovative staffing models help pre-K–12 districts and schools restructure to extend the reach of excellent teaching to more students, for more pay, within recurring school budgets
More on the implementation in Carlsbad Municipal Schools
Listen to our podcast with the superintendent and watch this video about team teaching roles
More on the initiative results nationally
Read how Opportunity Culture models boast over a dozen years of student learning growth and educator-pleasing results