At least, it could be that growing up near the Sandias is what gave San Antonito Elementary School students the edge last year. In Standards-Based Assessment tests, nearly 92 percent students tested were proficient in reading, the highest in the state among elementary school students.

"Kids that come out of here are excellent students on the whole," said the school's principal, Jane Lujan.

With 88.6 percent of students proficient in math as well, Roosevelt Middle School in Tijeras— the school most graduating San Antonito students move on to — is getting a pretty good deal, she said.

"That's what we keep telling Roosevelt," she joked.

The same class received honors for having the state's highest scores in science when they were fourth-graders, Lujan pointed out.

Which brings up the school's hands-on science instruction.

Mike Thuot, a retired physicist who worked at Los Alamos National Lab for 28 years, teaches a class twice a week.

"This is hardly particle accelerators, but this is fun," he said.

On Monday he taught Stephanie Gianopoulos' fifth-grade class about weather. More specifically, he taught students how the gauges one would find on a typical weather station tell us about the weather.

Thuot brought one of the students, Symon Majewski, in front of the class to create what he called the "Symon thermometer." It turned out to be a simple gauge made from a soda bottle full of colored water and a straw.

When the temperature of the water goes up, it expands in the bottle and pushes water up the straw, Thuot explained, just like the mercury in a traditional thermometer. Using an infrared thermometer, Majewski measured the temperature of the water, which was 20 degrees Celsius, and marked it down next to the water level.

Thuot went on to explain the weather gauges that measure humidity and barometric pressure.

A natural teacher, Thuot explained the same concepts several different ways over the course of the lesson, and had students eagerly raising their hands to answer his questions. He also drew on their knowledge from previous lessons to explain new concepts.

Thuot and Gianopoulos, along with Harritte Barber, recently received a $1,000 energy exploration grant from PNM. The school is using the money to buy the equipment used in interactive science sessions like the lesson on weather.