Anderson leaving school board to become priest

Jun. 20—Santa Fe school board President Sascha Anderson on Thursday announced plans to resign from the board to pursue ordination to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church.

"The reason I'm leaving has nothing to do with my time on the board of education," she said at Thursday evening's meeting. She said she's been accepted to the Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas, and will move there with her family.

Anderson said she plans to submit her formal resignation in July so the board can accept it at its July 25 meeting. After that, the school board would select a replacement from Anderson's central Santa Fe district to serve out the remaining 18 months of her term.

The board will have 45 days from when Anderson submits her resignation letter to pick a new member; if the board doesn't do so in the allotted time, the governor can make the appointment.

Anderson said she thought the process of getting accepted to the seminary would take three to five years, but it moved more quickly than she expected. She said public schools have had a profound impact on her and her children, who "have been in Santa Fe Public Schools since the moment they were eligible." She said her position on the board gave her a "front-row seat" to both the successes and the challenges facing the district.

"There is much more work to do, and I'm truly heartbroken that I won't be here to have a role in it," she said.

Making the switch from local politics to the priesthood may seem like a big jump, but Anderson said joining the priesthood is something she's "felt a calling toward" for a long time — and it's not entirely divorced from her work on Santa Fe's school board.

"Social justice is a really important part of being Episcopalian, and it's also a really important part of why I serve on the board," she said in an interview.

Anderson said she has wanted to become a priest since she was about 12 years old, moving through a confirmation class in Norman, Okla. Initially, other factors got in the way. As a young adult, she struggled with mental illness before finding a medication and therapeutic regimen that worked for her. As a mom to three young children, she found a community of friends and family to help ease the challenges of parenthood.

Now 40 and with her children in school, Anderson said she finally feels ready to provide the kind of emotional and spiritual support at the center of the priesthood.

"I realized I'm in a place where I can give emotionally to other people rather than just needing emotional support from other people," she said.

Although she knew she wanted to become a priest, Anderson said she didn't expect to pursue ordination so soon because she left college a semester shy of her bachelor's degree, which is required for seminary, an accredited master's degree program. She also left behind a debt that, over time, ballooned to about $10,000.

Anderson said she planned to spend five years slowly paying off her debt, finishing her bachelor's degree and then applying to seminary. But after learning seminaries admit a handful of people without bachelor's degrees, she crowdsourced the money necessary to pay off her debt in less than a week through a GoFundMe campaign.

She applied for admission to the seminary for fall 2024 and got in.

"I had no idea it would happen so fast," Anderson reflected. "But I have a lot of faith in God and in God's timing and in the movement of the Holy Spirit, and so I'm just going with it."

The Santa Fe school board last went through the appointment process in summer 2022, when it selected board Vice President Roman "Tiger" Abeyta to serve out the remainder of former board member Rudy Garcia's term. Abeyta ran unopposed to win his seat in 2023.

Though Anderson is proud of the work she's done to bolster Santa Fe Public Schools' Office of Student Wellness, approve smart budgets and invest in educators, she said her true talent as a board member was asking lots of questions. By the end of a dense presentation to the board, Anderson reliably had a list of questions to ask.

"I feel like that's been my primary strength throughout the last two and a half years — asking questions both to ensure that the public understands what we're doing [and] to help me understand," Anderson said.

Superintendent Hilario "Larry" Chavez said in an interview the board will feel the loss of Anderson's "unique perspective." As a parent, PTA member and then school board member, Anderson used her experience to encourage district staff to approach issues from new points of view, he said.

"For me, it was a pleasure to work with President Anderson. ... She will be missed, and I appreciate all the work and time that she did dedicate to the public schools," Chavez said.

Assistant City Editor Nathan Brown contributed.