As city officials move forward with a plan to acquire the College of Santa Fe campus, the chances that there will be some sort of arts school in Santa Fe get better.

But the timing has left many former CSF faculty members with the tough choice of waiting for something to happen or cutting their losses and leaving town.

Already, a few handfuls have left Santa Fe for other jobs, taking their talent and knowledge with them and, some say, leaving a hole in the community.

"It's called a brain drain," said Juliet Myers, director of education and public programs at SITE Santa Fe. "We have lost an extraordinary segment of our community as these people scatter to the wind."

And scatter they have, to Vancouver and Montreal, to Texas and Florida.

"I put down really solid roots in the community," said David Stout, who was a professor in the college's Moving Image Arts department. He moved to Santa Fe in 1994 and worked at the college for 15 years. "Leaving here is certainly not an easy thing."

Stout, a video artist and composer, found at CSF a place where he could create a curriculum that brought together new technology and art.

He said that he was lucky to have support from the department chair, Jonathan Wacks — who has left for the Vancouver Film School — and the resources for students to pursue innovative works.

"We had the budgets for these large-scale art and technology presentations," Stout said.

In addition to the unique situation he found himself in at the college, Stout also tapped into Santa Fe's reservoir of scientists in order to further his work.

Now, he and his family are moving to Denton, Texas, where he'll teach at the University of North Texas.

Kim Russo served as head of the college's art department until she accepted a severance package in December 2007.

Before moving to Santa Fe, she was a professor at Whittier College in Whittier, Calif., for 12 years.

During her time at CSF, Russo said, she worked to make the curriculum more interdisciplinary and add more art theory. She also worked to recruit more students by traveling to high schools and college fairs.

After leaving the college, she worked as an arts writer in Santa Fe. "I tried to stay in Santa Fe, but one thing I think is notable is that once CSF is gone, teaching positions are few and far between," Russo said.

She just moved to Sarasota, Fla., where she'll chair the art department at Ringling College of Art and Design.

It's not that the faculty leaving town will leave Santa Fe bereft of talented folks, Russo said, but "when they all came, they brought a wealth of fresh perspective and information." When they leave, they take that with them, she said.

As an art historian and researcher, Christina Cogdell found a job at the college after working at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center.

She started teaching art history full time in 2004. She was also part a team put together by Khristaan Villela, director of the Thaw Art History Center at the college.

"I was actually very excited about his vision for art history," Cogdell said. "I was hired to be the North American specialist."

Like Stout, Cogdell also wanted to take advantage of Santa Fe's store of scientists to augment her work. But the college's financial difficulties cut those opportunities short. She took a severance package in 2007.

She's currently on a fellowship at the Canadian Center for Architecture and her next stop is the University of California, Davis, where she has a teaching position.

Her subsequent jobs, as well as those received by colleagues, Cogdell said, "tell you this is a very qualified group of people."

Myers, with SITE Santa Fe, said that Santa Fe is still filled with artists, but those faculty members who've left represent "a unique blend of being an artist and a teacher."

"The loss is more the caliber of people who were teaching and bringing students along," Myers said. "Our loss, let's say, is somebody else's gain."

Contact John Sena at 986-3079 or jsena@sfnewmexican.com.