When Celina Roybal was a student at Abiquiú Elementary, she remembers having a knack for teaching gym class, in a sense.
“We’d be playing football and I’d be organizing games, I just always liked that,” Roybal, a Denver Broncos fan from Medanales, said. “I love watching sports, playing sports, being active.”
Now a physical education teacher at Abiquiú Elementary and Hernandez Elementary, Roybal has received a $1,200 grant from the Society of Health and Physical Educators, with which she plans to buy new equipment for her classes.
Starting in the 2018-2019 school year, Roybal’s classes will have pedometers to track students’ exercise, and equipment needed to play Tchoukball, a non-contact team sport.
“It’s something different,” she said. “I think in the Valley, we focus mostly on basketball, which irritates me. We need to expose our children to various activities.”
Roybal has been a member of the Society and coordinated Jump Rope for Heart events for 10 years. In the 2016-2017 school year, she and her students raised nearly $13,000 for cardiovascular disease and stroke research, and health education through the Society and the American Heart Association, according to a press release.
The grant also paid for Roybal to attend the Society’s national conference in March, in Nashville, Tenn., where Society officials recognized her as one of the 10 grant recipients from around the country.
Hernandez Elementary Principal John Sena said she is passionate about teaching and looks for opportunities — like the grant — on her own, without any prompting.
“She constantly has different activities going for the kids,” he said. “Sometimes there’s the inclination with elementary physical education that you let kids just run around, but the case with her, she’s always got structure and she’s always teaching kids really great skills.”
Leading a class of third and fourth grade students on April 25, Roybal took them through warm-up exercises, laps around the gym and a series of games with a large parachute.
She told the students the parachute is about lifting each other up, not bringing each other down.
The only way to properly lift the parachute into the air and play games with it, is for every student works together.
“I love doing the parachute because it is about community and helping others,” Roybal said. “Sometimes one student will pull down on it, and it really pulls down the whole thing. It really illustrates that point.”
Roybal splits time between her 90 students in Hernandez, and 130 students in Abiquiú.
Sena said it has not been a problem for his school.
“It hasn’t been a challenge primarily because we’re a smaller school, smaller than we’ve been in a really long time,” he said. “We can adjust our schedule so she sees every single one of our classes twice a week.”
Roybal said teaching runs in the family.
Her aunt is Elsa Trujillo, a librarian at Española Middle School, and her grandparents were teachers.
Her father, Tim Roybal, was a nationally recognized wood carver and a teacher of Spanish-colonial woodwork at Northern New Mexico College. He died of complications from pneumonia in 1998.
“He died when I was 20, and I kind of stayed around to take care of the house, and my mom, and my sister, who was still 15,” Celina Roybal said. “One day, I found a catalogue for Highlands and I saw human performance and sport, and I thought, ‘That’s me.’”
She received her bachelor’s degree in human performance and sport from New Mexico Highlands University in 2002, and got a job at Pojoaque Middle School in her last semester of study.
Celina Roybal later got her master’s degree in curriculum and education from Highlands University in 2006.
She worked at Española Middle School from 2003 to 2010, followed the ninth grade class when it was moved to Española Valley High School, then transferred to San Juan Elementary.
While working at the middle school, Celina Roybal advocated for physical education to be required of all Española School District students, after a diabetes-prevention group found in August 2005, that nearly 45 percent of freshmen were either overweight, or at risk of becoming overweight, according to a previous Rio Grande SUN story.
She took two years away from the public schools to teach fourth grade and physical education for the St. Joseph Worker Program in Pueblo, Colo.
She returned to Española two years ago.
“I always wanted to come back to my community,” Celina Roybal said. “I feel proud that I’ve been able to come back and serve my own people.”