Life's lessons learned
Local woman works to earn doctorate

Experience is the best teacher...: Elvira Stahn teaches classes at the UNM-Gallup campus. As a department chair and teacher who dropped out of high school after an unplanned pregnancy at 17, Stahn puts her life experience to work. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff writer

Stahn instructs students at the UNM-Gallup campus. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

GALLUP — Plenty of people sell their blood for plasma to earn a little extra spending money. Sit back. Let a nurse stick a needle in your arm. Watch the plasma drain out of your body for a few minutes. Cash a check.

As a young woman, Elvira Stahn did it to survive.

For the single Navajo mother of two young boys in a city full of strangers, juggling motherhood with a full load of college courses at the now defunct AAA Business College in Albuquerque in the mid-1970s, the ad for plasma donors in the local paper proved a godsend.

“The first time it was scary because I was in desperado land,” Stahn, who now chairs the University of New Mexico-Gallup’s Business Management and Technology Department, recalled from her Calvin Hall office between classes. But the clinic was clean, and the staff was kind. And besides, the $20 helped put food on the table and gas in her truck. She went back every two weeks after that, as often as they’d let her.

As a department chair and teacher who dropped out of high school after at unplanned pregnancy at 17, Stahn puts her life experience to work. She offers her students the kind of feedback and attention she wishes she’d received. Now, she’s surveying dropouts to find out what more the college can do to brink former students back.

‘Spam was our steak’
Stahn had forgotten about the Baskin Robbins near the corner of Central Avenue and Rio Grande Boulevard by the time she took a trip through Albuquerque’s old town a year ago. But when she caught sight of the shop, she couldn’t help crying a little.

Stahn used to buy her two boys ice cream there more than 30 years ago — when she could afford it. After paying the rent, stocking up on groceries and filling up on gas, she had little money left over for nonessentials. But when she did, with a little help from the clinic across the street, they’d all head to the Baskin Robbins.

Back then, she said, “the biggest treat was buying ice cream cones for my sons.”

“Spam was our steak,” she said, and with some green beans and tortillas on the side, “that was a special occasion, that was someone’s birthday.”

On such meager rations, they had little to offer Crybaby Charley, the family dog who died of starvation. Their next dog, Dr. Spiffy James Damon, fared better.

To Stahn, the sight of the shop was an unexpected reminder of those hard times, and of the two things that got her through them.

“I had no confidence in myself,” she said. “Zero. My kids gave it to me.”

After a full day of classes, Stahn would pick up what work she could find mending people’s cloths and baby-sitting their children. At home, she split her time between her children and her studies.

“I read books to my kids in the evening and I’d play with them,” she said. “Then I’d get up at 2 in the morning and do my homework.”

She didn’t date much.

“It seems like I missed out on my teenage life,” she said. “I hardly had fun. I had responsibility.”

But Stahn isn’t one for regret. She’s too busy moving forward. Even today, her wide-eyed stare shoots through her wire-rimmed glasses. When she sits, her restless hands take flight, vigorously miming her words.

After earning an associate’s degree from AAA Business College in 1976, Stahn moved on to the University of Albuquerque, where she earner a bachelor’s in elementary education and another in business administration. A master’s in education leadership from Western New Mexico University followed.

Through it all, she found time to remarry — her first marriage, a union forged more by the perceived obligations of two new parents than love, fell apart after a few years — and raise two more children, girls this time.

But Stahn did not stop there. She started on a doctorate in education at UNM in 2002. Driving into Albuquerque for her classes every Wednesday, she hopes to finish in 2009.

Back to school
As hard as it was, Stahn knows she wasn’t alone as a single parent/college student. Nor would she be alone today.

The average UNM-Gallup student is Navajo, female and 29 years old. Stahn figures most of those women have children. And although the school does not track marital status or dependents, the information UNM-Gallup statistician Jerry Jorgensen can glean from the financial applications students file suggests that 20 percent are parents and single.

“But that’s just not a statistic that we keep,” he said.

Since some students don’t apply for financial aid, Jorgensen suspects the true figure is probably even a little higher.

What the school knows for sure is that demand among students for the on-campus child care center is growing. Since the state licensed center opened 13 years ago, said Helen Zongolowicz, chair of UNM-Gallup’s Education Department, the waiting list has kept growing. But with only so much space and staff to go around, it can handle only 61 children at a time.

“We’re on the list for a new building,” she said, “but they probably won’t get to us for another three or four years.”

The school has also made it easier for parents to attend by offering classes on evenings and weekends.

“That allows some students to go to class because their older kids can take care of the younger kids,” Zongolowicz said.

The school’s Center for Career and Technical Education, meanwhile, trains students to become home child care providers. While helping to fill a shortage of center-based child care facilities in Gallup, it allows parents to earn money taking care of other people’s children while taking care of their own. With the extra cash, parents can keep taking classes.

But that doesn’t save everyone. Some parents still end up dropping out. Stahn wants to find out what more the school can do to bring them back. She mailed 450 surveys to former students last summer to find out what they’re up to and what they’d need to resume their studies. She’s heard back from only a dozen so far, but never expected the effort to bear fruit quickly.

In the meantime, Stahn offers her own students the support she missed out on growing up. In addition to chairing a department, she’s part of the teaching staff for the school’s Center for Career and Technical Education.

She believes every student should get to know his or her teacher and makes a point to meet with each one of her own students at least twice a semester. Like herself so many tears ago, some of her students are single mothers.

“Most of the time, just by me listening, they answer their own questions,” she said.

More than most, she also knows how far a little encouragement can go.

“That’s what I needed as a student,” Stahn said. “Just a little smile, or a good remark. I would have wrote it down and put it on my fridge at home.”