Bill,
I am envious of you in that my wife and I have been trying to figure out a way for us to move to northern NM ourselves. I can understand your misgivings about the state that the educational system is in. However, it isn't just California that the classrooms are bulging. I retired from teaching 2 years ago after 13 years and went back to engineering. It wasn't teacher burnout but the fact that school administrators are trying to run schools like a "for profit" business. It seems like they are trying to get the most bang for their (or our) buck. In reality classrooms are getting so large that no teacher can teach. It is all they can do to babysit, hence not much learning is done. Anyway, good luck and I do hope that NM has a better system than many states have adopted. It will be a beautiful place to live. Great people.
Gary