Goodbye to Girls Ranch: Now its the Boy and Girls Ranch

From the Santa Fe New Mexican - The dorm rooms, cafeteria and swimming pool are still there. But young female voices no longer ring out on the campus of the New Mexico Girls Ranch near Lamy. The home for troubled girls which opened in 1982 with the support of the late Alice King, then New Mexico's first lady closed in 2009. Now, the 117-acre property is for sale. The 18 young women who were living there when it closed have been moved to the New Mexico Boys & Girls Ranches campus in Valencia County, making the former Boys Ranch a co-ed community. Michael Kull, president of the nonprofit, which began serving at-risk boys in the 1940s and added programs for girls in the early 1980s, said the decision to close the Girls Ranch was purely financial. "A lot of the girls who grew up at the Girls Ranch don't want to see us do that, but it's about economic realities," Kull said, adding that regulations have added considerable expense to the business of caring for juveniles since the organization first began after World War II as a place for boys whose fathers didn't come home from the war. "Right now we are land-rich and cash-poor," Kull said. "We are going to sell a bunch of stuff and see what we get, and then the board is going to have to decide what we do from there. Part of the trouble is when you subject buildings to 50 years of teenage kids, every once in a while you need to tear down and build a new facility." Read more

Goodbye to Girls Ranch: Now its the Boy and Girls Ranch