Education
Runn Also Rises
For three years most of the students at this South Texas school—almost all of them poor and living in colonias—have passed the state’s TAAS test. How?
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When I asked some of the teachers the secret of the school’s success, Ofelia Gaona was at the top of the list. Others mentioned the staff’s shared vision. Connie Treviño, a kindergarten teacher at Runn, said everyone in the school worked well together, “because we all know what it’s like to be here when it’s raining.”
Unfortunately, it’s fairly rare for a school’s faculty to be so tightly knit, let alone a faculty that includes both veteran teachers born and raised in the region and young transient Yankees from Teach for America, a national corps of teachers that serves low-income school districts. Second-grade teacher Carlos Graupera—from Pennsylvania via American University in Washington, D.C., where he earned a master’s degree in painting—said he experienced no problems in being accepted by the veteran teachers: “That’s what’s been special for me, to come in here and feel like I’m a part of the community.”
Teachers at Runn are in constant conversation about their kids. First-grade teachers ask how their students did in kindergarten. Second-grade teachers check on the progress of their students who have moved on to higher grades. “We have time to tie shoelaces,” Gaona said. “If a child is absent, if there’s no phone number, we have time to go to the home and check on the children.” Runn’s size helps: At its peak, usually in January, the school historically has had only 390 students from pre-kindergarten through fourth grade, and the student-to-teacher ratio has been approximately 16 to 1. This year the school has added the fifth grade and around 450 students are enrolled.
Runn is becoming famous locally for the parents’ dedication to getting their kids to school. When a school bus couldn’t navigate a flooded road last year, one mother, walking barefoot, carried her child to school on her shoulders so that the child’s clothes would be clean for class. Two years before, the mother of another student slipped and fell into an irrigation ditch while walking her child to school. She was unable to climb out, but continued walking alongside her child until they reached a point from which the child could get to school alone. If children don’t show up for school because the bus can’t reach them, Gaona will find a teacher with a truck and go get them.
“We all feel looked after,” said Graciela Castillo, who is the mother of two Runn students. “We all know that the red car is Mrs. Gaona. And when something happens, look, here comes Mrs. Gaona’s car.”
Although the children are growing up in isolated, rural border communities, they are not the least bit shy with visitors. In a second-grade class a boy named Oscar walked up to me carrying a cardboard pizza-delivery box. “Do you want to see my portfolio?” he asked. He then opened the box and carefully pulled out stories and essays he’d written and illustrated with paintings or drawings, explaining each one in detail.
Maria Cazares, the mother of a fourth grader and a fifth grader at Runn, said the school works because the children get individual attention, which includes being welcomed by name by Gaona and any teachers and staff members they encounter as they arrive in the morning. “It teaches our children that it is beautiful to greet,” Cazares told me. “It says, ‘Hey, here I am!’”
Runn’s principal and teachers don’t take all the credit for the school’s turnaround. Said Donna school district superintendent Juan O. Garcia: “I think one of the primary reasons Runn has been very successful is because the parents get involved there.” Parents teach classes for other parents in basic parenting skills and how to help their children succeed in school. As one of the state’s 120 Alliance schools, a national network of public schools devoted to increased participation by low-income parents, Runn has been working with the community advocacy organization Valley Interfaith, holding meetings attended by Gaona, teachers, and parents in the colonias where the children live. It was pressure from parents that persuaded the district to add fifth grade to the school and to begin new classroom construction as part of a district bond package.
Gaona and her staff are always looking for materials, especially books, and better ways to teach at Runn. In collaboration with UT—Pan American, Runn started a dual-language curriculum two years ago, teaching in Spanish in the morning and in English in the afternoon, beginning in the earliest grades; the program will move up a grade each year along with the students. The early results are hopeful. Graciela Castillo said that her children became fluent in English in nine months at Runn.
Runn is unusual in that its teachers value their students’ migrant experience. While the shortened school year and inconsistent education of migrant children pose problems, teachers at Runn talk about how beneficial it is that these children can tell their classmates about the world beyond the Valley. A number of Runn teachers, many the children of migrant workers themselves, tutor the migrant children after school and on weekends to help them catch up. When these children tell school counselor Maribel Garza where they’ve been, she tells them, “Oh, I’ve been there. I used to do that.” She feels it gives them hope that they won’t be migrants all their lives.
As if their lives weren’t hard enough, the children of Runn are sometimes misted by crop dusters while on the school playground. In late winter the school is sometimes covered in thick black soot as nearby farms burn off stubble and debris from harvested fields of sugarcane. Smoke, pesticides, flooding, field rats in the computers, snakes in the classrooms—such are the plagues visited on a school surrounded by fields near the Rio Grande in the United States of America at the end of the millennium. Yet for these families, Runn is an oasis.
The “Runn Elementary Peace Mural-1999” graces four of the school’s exterior walls. Featuring the words and images of Anne Frank, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, it is the work of students involved in the nonprofit cultural arts program Proyecto Directo del Corazón (the Straight From the Heart Project). With the help of Gaona and several backers, former Runn teacher Aaron Brenner left classroom teaching in the summer of 1998 (after being named the teacher of the year for the Lower Rio Grande Valley by the local arm of the Texas Education Agency) to organize the project, which helps teachers in four Donna schools, including Runn, integrate art and theater into their classroom teaching. Brenner, Carlos Graupera, and several local artists also teach after-school and summer arts classes through the project, tying them to history lessons. Both Graupera and Brenner first came to Runn through the Teach for America program.
In January I sat in on an after-school art class led by Graupera and Brenner. The students were watching a film on Native American dream visions in Graupera’s second-grade classroom, which was bursting with their artwork: It covered the walls and crisscrossed the room on clotheslines. After the film ended, the class discussion moved from dream visions and the ideal spirit world they invoked to the students’ own visions of what would be included in their ideal world.
“People on bikes with flowers and houses with golden gates and sunsets and clouds,” a girl said.
“A cool place with lots of light,” said another student.
“Grandpas and grandmas.” “Selena.” “Movie stars.” “Presidents.” “Cesar Chavez.” “George Washington.”
And then a boy said, “School.”
A boy next to him asked, “School?”
“Yeah, school!” several kids shouted in unison.
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