When it came time for Judy DeVargas to retire at the end of the school year from her position as kindergarten assistant at McCurdy Elementary School, the students protested.
“The kids started coming up to me and they would tell me, ‘No! Ms. Judy! You can’t be leaving!’” DeVargas said. “And I’d say, ‘Oh, now, now, come on now. Ms. Judy’s been working a long time. It’s time for her to do something different.’ And they’re (saying), ‘No! Don’t do it!’”
Her teaching goal was to make the students feel as secure as possible while they learned how to learn in school.
“My big thing with kindergarten is making them feel safe,” she said. “You just need to really build their confidence and explain to them about why it’s important to come to school – it’s their job like mom and dad have a job – those were my little talks to them.”
J. Ortiz, who teaches kindergarten at Abiquiú Elementary School, said if the children needed anything, DeVargas was there for them.
“If they came without snacks, if they came without their hair brushed, whatever it was, she had a drawer where she kept everything they needed,” Ortiz said.
Eighteen years ago, however, despite the fact that her mother, father, grandfather, aunt, and uncle had all been teachers, DeVargas did not know that she would work in the classroom.
“I used to say, ‘I could never be a teacher,’” she said. “I didn’t think I ever could ever do that.”
IT calling
As soon as she graduated from Santa Fe High School in 1976, she began to take vocational classes, and two years later she received a certificate in Data Processing.
“I jumped into that world and enjoyed it because I got into computers at a time when the big blue IBM main frame computer was kind of not the best thing anymore,” she said. “PCs, and white area networks, and local area networks were all the new terminology, and the new lingo. And I loved it.”
She started working with computers for the New Mexico Department of Public Education Retirement.
DeVargas’ mother, Eleanor Hostetter, said that DeVargas “was able to climb up the ladder very quickly. By the time she was 21, she was the supervisor of her section. She just kept climbing to better and better positions.”
In her final 13 years before she retired from the state, through the Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department where she now worked, she visited 33 state parks, four forestry districts and three oil conservation districts.
“That was ideal for me,” DeVargas said.
Classroom volunteer
So when she retired from the department in 2000 to spend time with her daughter, Maria, DeVargas said, “It was a little weird for me.”
She decided to volunteer in her son Ron’s first grade classroom every Tuesday at Abiquiú Elementary School, and five years later, when she found that there was no aide in her daughter’s kindergarten classroom, she offered to serve as the aide.
“I would go and spend Tuesdays with (Ronnie),” DeVargas said. “And then I got involved in the Parent Teacher Organization – a group of parents and I started that. And so I started seeing myself getting busy, but I really enjoyed the classroom. And I thought, ‘Well I can do this on a volunteer (basis).’ And then my mom said, ‘Well what are you going to do when Maria goes to school?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m sure I’ll figure it out.’ Well, little did I know there wasn’t going to be a helper in the classroom.”
So DeVargas’s unexpected teaching career began.
From 2005 to 2010 she taught as a kindergarten and first grade aide at Abiquiú Elementary.
Then, when her son was in high school at McCurdy, which was at that time still a mission school, he found out the high school office needed a secretary.
“My son called me that day and said, ‘Mom, I just know you can do this job,’” DeVargas said.
The school couldn’t find anyone to work in the high school office, her son told her. He was confident she could do it. DeVargas was not convinced.
“So I went home and I talked to my husband,” she said.
She told him if she went to McCurdy it would uproot Maria from Abiquiú. He pointed out the whole family would drive to McCurdy together.
“‘Ronnie will be with you, and Maria,’” her husband said to her. “And he (her husband) was already the baseball coach (at McCurdy).”
DeVargas decided to talk to McCurdy’s principle about the job.
“It was a lot to do in that office,” she said. “And I said, ‘Well, we’ll try it for 90 days and see how it goes for both of us.’”
She stayed until 2012, when McCurdy became a charter school and she decided to take a break from the office. She spent the year scanning transcripts for the high school, so that anyone who attended McCurdy from 1926-2012 could pull up their transcripts on a computer.
“That was a lot of history,” she said.
Missing kindergarten
But DeVargas said each elementary school teacher works with a grade that she knows and likes, and she found herself missing kindergarten.
“They come in just so eager to learn,” she said about the kindergarteners. “You see this little bud that starts at the beginning, and you just see it blooming as time goes. And by the time they leave they’re little flowers. And you’ve prepared them. More than anything you’ve prepared them for the next level. And to be at the very beginning of that is very gratifying. It’s just pretty cool.”
So in 2013 she once again stepped into the classroom and taught for four more years.
“I loved it to pieces,” DeVargas said. “You can go to an office job every day, and affect your group of coworkers, but when you’re in the classroom, you affect 20, 25 kids every day. And when you get them to learn something, and master something, there is not a greater feeling than seeing someone be successful.”
She said there are no words to describe helping a student get to the next step and ultimately succeed at something.
“There’s no words for it,” DeVargas said. “It’s an incredible feeling.”
Bernadette French, who serves as the elementary school coordinator for McCurdy, said, (DeVargas) should have always been a teacher.
A knack
The first time DeVargas worked with a student in Ron’s first grade class, she realized she had a knack for helping students.
When she tells stories about her former students, the kids come alive behind her words, and it is evident how much she cares about each one.
“There was one little girl that (Ronnie’s teacher, Esta Gutierrez) wanted me to work with one-on-one,” DeVargas said. “I’m a very touchy-feely person, and I put my hand on her to tell her something, and she goes, ‘Don’t. Touch. Me.’”
DeVargas told the girl she was naturally like that but acknowledged she had crossed a boundary. She apologized and said now she knew.
DeVargas’s face, as she tells the story, alternates between her own emotions and the child’s feelings, which she treats with the utmost seriousness.
“And so we kept working.” DeVargas continued. “I think it was after the first nine weeks, the teacher told me, ‘I think I’m ready to add a few more kids to your group.’”
(The student) told her she liked it when it was just the two of them. DeVargas agreed but told her she would learn more now that there would be more students.
That day, a few weeks after asking DeVargas not to touch her, she hugged her teacher.
“And I said, ‘Okay. I can handle this,’” DeVargas said.
When Gutierrez asked whether DeVargas had taught before, she replied, “‘No, but it’s in the genes. It’s there and it’s tucked away somewhere. It’s finding its way to the surface.’”
Math matters
What makes DeVargas such a good teacher, at least in part, is her ability to look at each student as an individual and figure out what he/she needs in order to learn.
She taught one student who considered math unimportant.
DeVargas noticed that once in a while, the student would come to class wearing “a little bit of eye shadow on her eyes.”
“I told her one day, ‘Are you wearing eye shadow?,’” DeVargas said.
“‘I am,’ she said. And I go, ‘Well, did you know, that when Mom goes to the store, how much eye shadow is?’ And she goes, ‘Um, no.’”
At that point, the teachers were covering money within the math curriculum. So DeVargas picked up an advertisement from Walgreens that displayed the price of eye shadow and circled it.
“I told (the student), ‘Okay, look at this. This is a $1.99 for this 4-pack of eye shadow.’ I said, ‘If I give you eight quarters, how much is that?’
“‘Oh that’s easy,’ she said, so she put four and four (quarters together) and she goes, ‘That’s two dollars.’ And I say, ‘Okay! So your eye shadow costs $1.99 – how much money are you gonna get back from the attendant?’ And she said, ‘A penny?’
“‘A penny,’ I said, ‘very good. So are you sure you don’t need math?’
“‘Oh, so even for buying makeup?,’ she said. I said, ‘Even for buying makeup.’”
The girl no longer thought that math did not matter.
Mother-nurtured talent
A nightly phone conversation with her mother has helped DeVargas develop this natural talent.
“She’s my mentor,” DeVargas said. “She’s the one that helps me when I have a question about how to handle things. She would always be there to help me.”
Hostetter, who taught for 38 years at elementary schools in Santa Fe before retiring in 2008, said, “Judy and I have a standing phone time, which is 10:20 every night. So at 10:20 if I don’t call Judy, she calls me.”
Hostetter became a teacher after DeVargas and her siblings lost their father, and Ms. Hostetter her husband.
“Luckily I was able to go back to school after their dad passed away,” Hostetter said.
To get her teaching degree, she had to commute from Mora, where the family lived, to Highlands University, for three-and-a-half years. Then, in 1970, when DeVargas was in eighth gade, Hostetter got a job at Kearny Elementary School in Santa Fe and moved the family there.
“Judy really did see what it took to be a single mom, and go back to school and finish,” Hostetter said. “I was a young mom, and we grew up together, especially after their dad passed away.”
When DeVargas began teaching, the classroom became the center of their conversations.
Hostetter said DeVargas would often ask, “‘What do you think, Mom? I tried this today, I tried that today – is there anything in your book of tricks I should try?’ She was always so receptive. We managed to get these kids where they were willing and able and hungry to learn.”
Reading challenge
It was the successes, as well as the challenges DeVargas faced in the classroom, that she would tell her mother about.
Once, for instance, a kindergartener was struggling to learn how to read. When the kindergarteners could read a book without anyone’s help, the teachers would ask them to read aloud to the class. But this student could not yet read a book without help, and he watched his classmates one by one stand before the class and read on their own.
“This one little boy would tell me all the time, ‘Ms. Judy, I wanna do that so bad,’” DeVargas said. “And I go, ‘You will. You will.’”
DeVargas said she went back to a selection of slightly easier reading material to find something that would help him get more confidence. She found a book and told him to take it home and read it to his family.
“So then the next day he came in all excited and he goes, ‘You know what? I can read to the class today.’”
Devargas took him out to the hallway to practice.
“I said, ‘You got it. High five. Let’s do it.’ So I came in and I told the teacher, I said, ‘He’s ready to read to the class today.’
“What amazed me more than morning than anything – I’m gonna get all teary-eyed – how the kids applauded him. They were just so thrilled that he read that book.”
DeVargas said he learned how important it was to read his books and take them home and practice and come the next day and read to the class.
“My mom tells me, ‘Oh my goodness, I could just hear the excitement in your voice,’” DeVargas said.
Entire family
Her mother is not the only family member with whom she shares her excitement for teaching.
Her husband, whom she met when she was working at the New Mexico Educational Retirement Board, has been coaching baseball at McCurdy for 12 seasons and volleyball for two.
Last year, when the sixth grade class was looking for a permanent substitute, DeVargas encouraged him to fill the role.
“I told him, ‘It’s a tough grade, but I think they need a male person in there, and I think that’ll make a huge difference.’ And in the end, he had won them over, like he always does,” she said.
That they both have taught, she said, “makes interesting conversations in the evenings sometimes.”
And Robert DeVargas was not the only other DeVargas at McCurdy. In February, the high school science teacher left. DeVargas’s son took her place for the year, and DeVargas would offer him advice about classroom management – once, for example, his students kept losing their class packets, and DeVargas helped her son figure out how to hold the students accountable so that he would not have to make more copies.
When both Robert and Ron DeVargas were subbing, Robert and Judy DeVargas’ daughter, Maria, was completing her final year of high school at McCurdy.
“The whole family was (at McCurdy) – it was kind of funny,” said DeVargas. “Everbody would say, ‘Oh, the whole DeVargas family is here today.’ Close to our heart. The school is close to our heart.”
Retirement
In her retirement, she plans to spend time with her family, helping her daughter adjust to college and reading with her mom.
“I love to read,” said Hostetter. “I have bookcases that are full of very very good literature. And my Judy loves to read, so I know for sure we will be involved in a lot of reading some of the books that are on Mom’s shelves. We just love spending time together. We have such an ability to communicate things with each other.”
Some at McCurdy, however, are not ready for DeVargas to retire.
“We’re hoping to bring her back part-time, so she can still spend time with her family, but we can share a part of her,” French said.
The most important part of DeVargas’ job as an aide has consisted not only in helping the students learn, but in helping the teachers teach. They, like the students, have grown attached to her.
“She always knew what to do,” French said. “She helped the teachers she worked with pick up the pieces and make the classroom run like a well-oiled machine.”
Ortiz, whom DeVargas taught beside during Ortiz’s first year of teaching, said, “From day one she was by my side. There were things I didn’t know I needed, and she just did them, before I even knew I needed them. I really don’t think I could have gotten through without her.”
DeVargas is planning to hang on to her sub license, and she will continue working with the Booster Club.
“That way I can break away slowly,” she said. “Because I know it’s going to be tough.”
Goes both ways
While DeVargas taught, she was also learning from her students.
She recalls “one little girl in particular who used to have some very tough mornings.”
Most mornings, the girl would walk onto the playground crying after she had been dropped off. “The little kids would start going up to her and making sure she was okay. By the time she got to the classroom she was fine. And I would go up to her and I would ask her, ‘Are you okay today?’ ‘I’m fine.’ ‘Okay.’ And at that point you could tell (that she) had left it behind, whatever had happened in the morning.”
For DeVargas, watching this student each morning was a reminder to leave anything negative out of the classroom.
“You walk in that door, you say, ‘Okay, that stays back there.’ And you move forward. I knew as an adult that that’s what we needed to do. But when I saw it with a student, especially so young, I thought that was, like, ‘Wow.’”
DeVargas said incoming teachers should be thanked for being in the profession, “because we need educators so bad.”
Then, she said she would advise those teachers, “Treat your kids like you would treat your own. And when you talk to them, talk to them because you care about them. And (you’ll gain their) respect in a heartbeat, because that street goes both ways – if you show them that you care about them, and they sense that, and they see it, then they’ll care about you too. And you’ll have a good year.”