Scuttlebutt on the Border: Death of a country school

Once upon a time there was a charming little schoolhouse along the Rio Grande River where two teachers tended to the book-learning of the village children. Some children even came from the other side of the river, in Mexico, where they didn’t have a school of their own. It was a warm and affectionate schoolhouse, a Charles Kuralt sort of place, bustling with energy. Kids came early for breakfast, pledged allegiance in the crisp morning air and stayed late for extra tutoring. Some of the older kids who had already graduated, came back to tutor or be tutored when they got off the bus from the big school forty-five miles away. Now the school is boarded up and the children have to get up in the dark to ride a bus two hours a day.

Candelaria is a tiny village in south-west Texas just across the Rio Grande River from its Mexican sister village, San Antonio. A small footbridge made out of two truck chasses and some boards and cable joins the two communities across this international border deep in the San Christobal Mountains. A year ago when I was in Candelaria the school was alive with the joy of learning and the devotion of the two teachers. I am saddened to see weeds growing where children should be playing. I am saddened to know that now some kids have no school and others have a two-hour bus ride instead of playground time. It is impossible for me to say exactly when the ball (steamroller) started rolling towards the school, but lets go back only as far as the intrusion (invasion) of the United States Marines last January when they "offered" to build a Quonset Hut in the school playground, with the promise that the children and community would be able to use part of the building as a gymnasium. That no one bothered to ask why the United States Marines should suddenly be so charitable mocks the adage to never look a gift horse in the mouth.

Where and why did the Marines get the idea to build something in Candelaria in the first place? Frankly, I did not know that the United States Marines built stuff; I always thought they were supposed to be in Montezuma or Tripoli making the world safe for Americans. Maybe it was supposed to be a construction exercise getting some reservists ready for Iraq. I mean, if there isn’t a war someplace what are the United States Marines supposed to do? So they move into the village of Candelaria, Texas to build their Quonset hut, all 100 of them. They move their trucks, bulldozers, scrapers, articulated loaders and cement mixers as well as their commissary, tents, toilets and generators into the little playground of the Candelaria elementary school.

This does not recommend Marine intelligence or sensitivity, neither of which they are famous for anyway. Remember, we are not talking about Vermont here. We are talking about a part of the country where a "small" ranch might be 30, 000 acres; this is west Texas where there’s more snake-bitin, scorpion-stingin, hard-rock, starry-skied, uninhabited, horizon-curvin, awesome wilderness in one county than the whole state of Connecticut….and the Marines have to set up shop in the school yard? Like, Hello?

While I find it rather quaint that the United States Marines should seek comfort behind the schoolyard fence, this is not a situation endorsed by serious educators. After all, 100 Marines in a schoolyard is to education what the west Texas sun is to Malignant Melanoma. I mean, its one thing for a bunch of soldiers to camp out in the schoolyard over Christmas break and be gone by January; but six months? Imagine trying to learn the multiplication tables while the big D-9 outside the window revs up for another cut, then the beep, beep, beep as it backs up….and the front-end loader scoops up the hard rock and dirt and dumps it into the always-running Caterpillar truck….and the dust all day, and the exclamations, and the fascination of all these marvelous machines and martial people dressed in "camo". "Military intelligence" was never so moronic.

Aside from the distractions, what about the dangers? Next to rushing rivers, cliffs, freeways, electric sockets, spiders, snakes, strangers and boiling water heavy construction equipment is one of the last things you want around little kids. So where was the Superintendent of Education in all of this? I mean, I can easily understand that the Superintendent would be deaf to the laments of the teachers about the noise and dirt in their classes as well as their very living quarters (the teacher’s mobile homes were also on the school grounds) but not blind to the very serious physical danger to school children and the criminally negligent litigation that would follow an accident. Maybe the Superintendent thought "dodge the dozer" would be fun for the kids; teach them the fundamentals of Darwinism without offending the local creationists.

By the way, nobody seems to wonder why it took the Marines three months to build this thing. A Quonset hut is a "ready-to-assemble- temporary shelter." We are not talking Taj Mahal. I guarantee that my brother-in-law and half a dozen of his steel workers would put that thing up in a week, slab and all. If it takes the Marines three months to put up a temporary shelter we better think twice before our next donnybrook with Mr. Sadaam Hussein.

Okay, so maybe the Marines just liked the view, the friendly people and the tranquility; can’t fault them there. What else? Well, shortly after the Marines leave the kids in the village take a "standardized test" and guess what? Apparently somebody sent the wrong test. Instead of the one about excavation, concrete finishing and temporary shelters they sent the one about reading, writing and arithmetic. You don’t need to be Richard Feynman to figure out why the scores were so low. But rather than the villagers suing the school board and the Marines for reckless endangerment and malfeasance, the school board fires the teachers! This is sort of like blaming the NYFD for the attack on the World Trade Center! And, lost in the shuffle is the fact that prior to this ignominy, Candelaria’s standardized test scores had been, for several years running, the highest in the state.

Just yesterday, I talked with a friend with whom I had been traveling during my first visit to Candelaria and practically the first words out of his mouth were, "Say, how’s that incredible little school doing down there?" But it could have been the best school in America and the school board would have closed it because the unspoken credo of all public school administrators is "democracy of mediocrity." There is an old saying; "those who can do and those who can’t teach." To that I would add, and those who can’t teach administrate.

One doesn’t learn to be a great teacher in a graduate class any more than you learn to be a great running back sitting in front of diagrams on a chalkboard. Graduate classes for administrators teach about budgets, deficits, legal and fiscal priorities. These are $100, 000 a year jobs! Their main concern is to keep the place warm, full and trouble-free. They don’t have the time to be intimately involved in the subtleties of great individual teaching. If you think that I am overly cynical about the relationship between administrators and teachers get this: one of the Candelaria teachers was offered the chance to drive the school bus to and from Presidio every day, in addition to teaching her classes! Nobody who has ever spent a full day in a classroom with a bunch of third graders would ever think of anything so stupid. Why not ask doctors to drive ambulances?

None of this would ever have happened in a regular school of course because the parents in a regular school would have been at the school board office faster than you can say Parent-Teacher Association. But we don’t have regular parents here do we? The parents of most of these children are persona non grata who live across the river in……MEXICO! Perhaps this is approaching the root of the problem. For all practical purposes these kids are educational orphans. Maybe there are some people who don’t like the idea of spending U.S. tax dollars teaching the children of San Antonio, Mexico even if they are, in fact, U.S. citizens. Past superintendents understood the delicacy of this situation but now, obviously, these kids are caught in the crossfire of some bigger plans. First close the school and perhaps the town will follow. Maybe that is the longer-term plan.

So, one day you wake up and there is a sign in the field across the street from your house announcing the site of a new mall, or one day in August you read in the paper that your kid’s school is closed and you will now have to get up two hours earlier in order to put your five-year-old on the bus in the pre-dawn chill for an hour’s ride on a road which would be lovely in a Porsche. The fait acompli is an age-old devise of tyrants. Well, fact is, the school board did give the Candelaria community two week’s notice and a formal meeting with the superintendent was scheduled a few days before classes were to begin. Of course, the meeting was in Presidio, forty-five miles away from Candelaria but it might as well have been in Dallas as far as most of the parents were concerned because THEY lived across the river and, as poor Mexicans would have a four hour drive on rough roads and little chance of getting into the United States at the Presidio boarder crossing and even then, would have a two mile walk to the school administration offices. The folks who did attend the meeting were ridiculed because the were "just local residents and ranchers."

One afternoon I happened to be in Candelaria when the school bus came. I watched as the kids got off and ran across the road without looking. Everlasting teacher that I am I walked over to the bus and started to say to the driver, "Hi, you probably can’t see from where you are but several of these kids didn’t look as they ran across the…." and the door was closed as the bus U-turned and disappeared in the distance.

Postscript. The cute little school and the new Quonset hut sit mutely locked and unused on the hill above Candelaria….so much for government largesse. Rumor has it the school board is going to lease the Quonset hut to the Border Patrol (probably the plan all along). Since there is no deed to be found for this property (at least a day at the country seat proved fruitless in my search) it will be interesting to see who actually takes up residence on a property which does not formally exist. Anyway, gone are the days of charming laughter and the creak of swings taut to the sky, balls bouncing and the rhymes of rope jumping. The little school with its flag proudly waving was the heart and hope of the community. Hope now begins with a wait in the dark and a forty-five-mile yellow bus ride.