The Answer - A blog about Education, Preparation, and Commitment.

A Trailer Park Elegy: YES Prep Southeast Moves into a new building

December 22, 2010 by Jeremy Jones

Today in our staff meeting, we watched a video put together by our yearbook staff. The video showed photos of our campus as it was when we moved there in 2001 and moved chronologically through just this week, as we Wizards have been packing to move into our permanent home, so long in the making. I am one of five people on the Southeast staff who was there at the start, so this move is bittersweet.

Trailer Park Elegy is a guest essay by long-time YES Prep Southeast High School English Teacher and Kinder Award Winner Leigh Anne Rayburn.

In the summer of 2001, I had only one year of teaching under my belt. I was 27 years old and still green about so much that had to do with education. My previous year at YES had been spent in a two-acre bit of parking lot on the outskirts of downtown; our new stretch of 26 acres seemed immense, with infinite possibilities. The land was dry and unkempt; it had been a horse farm, had very little grass, and was not welcoming. We had to make it ours.

We pushed back the start date of school that year twice. Torrential rains kept us from getting canopies up, electricity wired, grass planted, and so much else. One afternoon as I ran from building to building, lightning struck the canopy above me, nearly killing me with fright and simultaneously knocking out our Internet connections. I remember being given a roster of seventh-graders and calling them to explain that we would not start for another week. They handed the phones to their parents, incredulous. Then, we had to call again. The start date was not until September 4, a full month later than we start now.

The sixth day of school was September 11.

I was on the math deck when senior Melanie Singleton told me what happened in New York, in Washington, in Pennsylvania. I only had to take a few more steps before my mother, in her first year of teaching geometry at YES, found me, hugged me, both of us unable to comprehend. A television was set up in Angela Perkins’s art room, where we watched with staff and students alike, fearful and unsure what to say to our children. I felt the little ones watching me, aware that I was crying, and not sure if that was kosher or not. Either way, I couldn’t help it.

There were so few of us in the YES world then. Maybe 40 of us, grinding every day to make possible a mission that few would be crazy enough to tackle. We worked 80-hour weeks, never saw our spouses, if we had them, never dated if we didn’t. Most of us were childless, unless you count the 93 we saw in our overpacked classes every day. And they were everything: hungry (sometimes literally), eager, angry, full of potential, neglected, affectionate. Every day was a new challenge, and we scraped along, building the plane as we flew.

It was like this for years. New additions to our staff would be shocked to know that words like objective, common assessment, rubric…those were fancy words we never touched. Lesson plans, if written down at all, may have been on a post-it note. There were no textbooks, no laptops, no networks. The guy in charge of our paychecks crossed his fingers twice a month that they wouldn’t bounce.

Every spot on our little trailer park holds a memory for me. From planting grass squares in 2001, to boarding up our windows in 2005 as Hurricane Rita churned in the Gulf, to repairing the damage made by Ike in 2008, we held the campus together by the seams. It was never pretty to the naked eye, but we loved it. We planted flowers repeatedly, built habitats, made a garden for our beloved Emily Benavidez when she died of cancer in 2004 at only 13. We created a huge mosaic for our courtyard that still stands today. We added on, we shared rooms three or four at a time, we talked eternally about the day we would get a building.

And now that day is here.

And the building is beautiful.

It is so much more than any of us from 2001 could ever have dreamed. It looks, as the kids would say, like “a real school.” I’m not sure what that means, because Southeast Wizards have been outworking the kids at “real schools” for over a decade. It doesn’t get any more real than YES Prep.

The alumni are sad that the building didn’t exist for them; the current students grumble that our new home will not allow us to experience the fresh Pasadena air and sunshine.

Right now, we are all in limbo. We “crusty veterans,” as Chris Barbic would say, are still anchored in our tin-walled T-buildings. I have been taking down signs in my classroom, packing up books, saying goodbye. My late mother taught in the same room once. When I leave the trailer, I leave her memory as a YES teacher there. When the buildings are towed away, we can only turn toward the future. We can only look out our beautiful windows at where we once were.

But the nostalgia will come and go. What will never change is what keeps us there day to day. The years pass, teachers come and go, the geography evolves, but we show up at dawn every morning to see the Wizards – the beautiful children whose parents give them over to us, dreaming of a better future, trusting us to pave that path for them.

I will miss those trailers, but I still have what matters..

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