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  CONTESTED CHANGE AT ALAMO MIDDLE SCHOOL Palmer Elementary was the first school in the Rio Grande Valley to become an Alliance School and to capitalize on the resources offered by the new venture. Its progression within the network has been relatively frictionless, as teachers and parents have supported one another in joint relationships that aim to improve both the school and the community. Yet because of the smooth and gradual progression of its relationship with the community, Palmer is perhaps atypical. One school with a more contested history in the Alliance School network is Alamo Middle School, located a few miles east of Palmer on Highway  in Alamo. Opened in  to accommodate Alamo’s growing population, the middle school was a tough place for students and teachers alike in its first few years. In spite of its sparkling new facilities, gangs dominated the hallways and teachers constantly had to discipline students for food fights, unruly behavior in classrooms, and altercations in restrooms. ‘‘It was a zoo,’’ Lesley Whitlock, an assistant principal, recalled . ‘‘We had gangs and we had three or four fights going on at once.’’ Frightened by the breakdown in respect for authority, teachers withdrew from one another and focused on their own classrooms. ‘‘One of the worst things of that time,’’ one sixth grade teacher remembered, ‘‘is that teachers wouldn’t support other teachers. A student would cuss you out, or run down the hall, and even if other teachers saw it, they wouldn’t say anything.’’ The first principal, Scott Owings, struggled without success at Alamo for two years, at which point the school board decided that a change in leadership was needed.1 The school board thought that they found a possible leader for Alamo Middle School in René Ramirez, an assistant principal at Pharr– San Juan–Alamo High School, known in the area simply as ‘‘PSJA.’’ Ramirez had been in charge of discipline at PSJA and had done an effective job. In addition, Ramirez seemed eager to be in charge of a campus, and to expand his leadership beyond simply keeping order in the school. Like Salvador Flores, Ramirez is an active Catholic who wanted his school to respond to issues that were having an impact on the whole community. As a young man he was an altar boy at Saint John the Baptist in San Juan, where he grew up in the Palma Vista colonia, and he worked with other young people to hold prayer meetings in the various colonias in and around San Juan. ‘‘I got close to the people in the community that way,’’ he recalled, ‘‘and I thought it would be terrific to be an educator and to find a way to connect the school to the home and the community and to bring everything all together.’’ After graduating from PSJA in , he headed off to college, then returned to teach in his home community in .2 In his first year at Alamo, Ramirez made an effort to know the faculty, the students, and the community. He implemented no bold changes, and simply worked on winning the trust of his colleagues and the pupils. Based on his observations, he felt that many changes were needed in the school, but was unsure about which path to change to pursue. As with most middle schools in Texas, classes at Alamo were roughly fifty minutes long and the school was organized around its departments , with different sections of the building devoted to science, social studies, English, and so forth. Orthodox as this arrangement was, it did not appear to be working for the students.Yet which reforms were appropriate? Recognizing the need for new information, Ramirez formed teams of teachers and parents in his second year that went with him to visit Texas schools that were exploring innovative approaches to instruction , curriculum design, assessment, and community engagement. One school that they visited was J. Frank Dobie Middle School in Austin, which gave them a number of ideas about strategies for transforming the internal culture of Alamo from that of a junior high school to a more ageappropriate middle school concept. Dobie radicalized Ramirez’s concept of what needed to be done with Alamo. ‘‘When I first got here,’’ he said, ‘‘what we really had was a miniature high school. Our layout was just like a high school, with a bunch of different departments scattered around and no one really keeping track of our kids in a way that...

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