Valley Interfaith and School Reform: Organizing for Power in South Texas

Chapter Four: TRANSFORMING SAM HOUSTON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

  TRANSFORMING SAM HOUSTON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL In the early s Sam Houston Elementary School could be found in the heart of a barrio called La Paloma by its inhabitants in southcentral McAllen, Texas. Although McAllen is a small city by most measures , Sam Houston’s immediate environment appeared very similar to the West Side of San Antonio or the East Side of Austin; tiny shacks packed with immigrant families alternated with more stable middleclass homes, and all kinds of farm animals, ranging from roosters to goats, could be seen in small backyards or wandering into the streets, indicating just how close ostensibly urban residents remained to the pace and texture of rural life. Sam Houston served a low-income Mexican American community that witnessed scant evidence of the growing prosperity of McAllen’s North Side. First opened in , Sam Houston was the oldest public school in McAllen. Regretfully, the district had allowed the building to run down, and it was badly in need of structural repairs. Sam Houston’s principal was Connie Maheshwari. The daughter of Carmen and José Anaya, Maheshwari had traveled with her parents as a migrant laborer throughout the s and s and had lived out her parents’ dream that she acquire an education and enter a profession. Once she had graduated from Pan American University in nearby Edinburg and entered teaching, Maheshwari observed her mother’s political development with Valley Interfaith around the issue of colonias improvement in Las Milpas. Maheshwari harbors no hard feelings about the poverty that confronted her when she grew up: ‘‘My mother taught us to be strong and persistent, and my father taught us to be open and accepting. When you have parents like that, you might not have much money, but you’re so rich that it’s really unbelievable.’’1 Maheshwari entered teaching in  at Wilson Elementary School and was the assistant principal at Rayburn Elementary School in McAllen from  to . She was appointed principal of Sam Houston in the fall of  and spent several years developing her leadership skills and struggling to improve the academic achievements of the more than five hundred children in attendance. She first became interested in the Alliance School partnership with Valley Interfaith when Father Bart Flaat of Saint Joseph’s the Worker Catholic Church in South McAllen set up a meeting to promote the new school network in McAllen in January . Father Bart’s leadership of the Alliance School initiative in South McAllen provides a marked point of contrast to the situation at Palmer and Alamo, where clergy have played a less visible role in the development of the school reform effort. Saint Joseph’s provides a dramatic exempli fication of the notion that strong and active church leadership can play a powerful role in developing the civic capacities of low-income citizens and immigrants.2 Father Bart had been active with Communities Organized for Public Services (COPS) in San Antonio from  to , where he was recruited into the community-based organization by Robert Rivera, the lead organizer at that time.When Father Bart accepted a position at Our Lady of the Assumption in Harlingen in , he attempted to join Valley Interfaith immediately, but instead had to spend two years working with his parishioners to develop their trust in the organization before they agreed to become dues-paying members. Yet even when they did join, the cautious congregation never developed the civic leadership of which Father Bart was persuaded they were capable. Father Bart discovered a similar atmosphere at Saint Joseph’s when he took over its leadership in . Although Saint Joseph’s supported Valley Interfaith, Father Bart considered it to be a ‘‘sleeping member,’’ one that rarely organized in any active way to support the agenda of the community-based organization. Yet Father Bart sensed a hunger for change among many individuals with whom he had his first contacts in his parish, which comprises a number of neighborhoods—La Paloma, Hermosa, Balboa, Alta Linda, and Los Encinos—in South McAllen. To ascertain the depth of such sentiments, Father Bart began a series of conversations in the community. ‘‘We held thirty house meetings in my first two months in McAllen,’’ he said, ‘‘and I met over two thousand people who live here. And basically, I asked them to tell me two things: first, their stories, and second, their dreams. I wanted to know what they       hoped for, what they dreamed for...