Dear Editor,
I was a La Tierra Montessori student from kindergarten to the beginning of 5th grade. I have seen a lot of things go on in the school, but there has never been such a disaster like this GC (Governing Council). In my opinion they don’t care about the students of La Tierra.
They have continued to destroy the hopes of the school ever being what it was supposed to be. The police have been called on four parents.
That shows that the administration has targeted students and parents. That shows that this is not a safe environment for anyone. Yet, I still think that we can save the school. That is why we are trying to build a new school for everyone in the valley.
Ixchel Dudek, 11 years old
Ojo Caliente
Dear Editor,
I think it would help lots of people in the valley to have a school they can trust that is not a private school.
We need an alternative to the Española Public School style. It will be Montessori and free – that is what we need in Española. The school we want to implement should have experienced Montessori trained teachers, because at La Tierra there were some teachers that were not experienced at all. They need staff members that can communicate with the parents and students about the things that are going on in the school. They need teachers that actually teach the things that you need to know in life.
Tonahli Tarin-Ogren, 11 years old
Peñasco
Dear, Editor
The Governing Council and head Learner pick out enemies and focus fanatically on punishing them rather than attending to their responsibilities. And it doesn’t take a lot to become an enemy: you just have to criticize one policy decision, speak out on an abuse of power, or otherwise exercise your First Amendment rights in a way they don’t like. And the children are collateral damage, if they even enter the calculations at all. It’s a pattern of behavior that makes abundantly clear the GC’s priorities, and goes a long way toward explaining why the school tanked so hard.
Under current regulations (at least as I understand them), it’s next to impossible to hold a charter school GC accountable for its misdeeds if they’re collective—the work of a group of people acting in concert, not one rogue individual abusing their power or otherwise doing wrong, wrong in which their fellow board members aren’t complicit. When you’ve got a situation like we had, where the GC’s presenting a united front against the school community—when their attitude toward teachers and parents is openly adversarial, and their attitude toward students either indifferent or implicitly adversarial, and they think of the administrative apparatus intervening between them and the teachers as a tool for executing their will—then under regulations the only remedy is charter revocation. When a normal public school’s GC can be unilaterally removed by the PEC, without GC members having to vote on their own eligibility to continue holding their respective offices (or even baselessly rejecting all petitions directed against them as forged or otherwise suspect), it seems ludicrous that then only solution to a comparable case at a charter school is this “nuclear option” of shutting the school down. Members of the school community—in which I include teachers, parents, and students as equal participants, since they all have a stake in the matter—should be able to somehow unilaterally depose individual GC members or entire GCs.
At the end of the day, the GC was entrusted with a lot: stewardship of public funds (which Isaac claims to have taken very seriously), but more importantly the welfare of deeply marginalized children from a criminally underserved part of the altogether criminally underserved rural United States. They had an opportunity to work with these children and their parents and teachers to provide for them the opportunities they’ve been so long and so unjustly denied, but they squandered it on self-indulgent power trips and God only knows what else. Isaac himself sneered that authentic Montessori education was usually something associated with wealthier, whiter/more Anglo parts of the country—and rather than recognizing this is as a problem, and
committing to expanding more egalitarian, child-oriented, or otherwise progressive methods of education to the kids who need them most, implying that the many poor, non-Anglo children of color in the Española Valley simply didn’t deserve it. That’s a self-evidently disgusting sentiment, but after traditional methods of education as practiced in the US have proven such dramatic failures for even many of the best-off among us, is particularly insensitive.
La Tierra Montessori
Parents and Community Members