Teachers on a mission
Educators take on poverty with knowledge
ABOVE: Teach for America instructor Meghan Gibas puts up a chart to show results from a science class project. Miyamura students learned about scientific investigation by making their own Kool-aid and then chosing something to change about the recipe in order to explore independent and dependent variables. BELOW: Teacher Sarah Gallagher is also a part of the Teach for America program. — © 2008 Gallup Independent / Brian Leddy

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Gaye Brown de Alvarez
Staff writer

GALLUP — Of the 13 million children growing up in poverty, about half will graduate from high-school.

Those that do graduate will perform at an eight-grade level.
Landon Mascareñaz was one of the people who wanted to make a difference in the quality of education in poverty-stricken areas.

So he came to Gallup. He joined Teach For America and is one of 80 teachers who joined the Gallup-McKinley County School District. Each school has about two or three of the TFA teachers to help “offer the individualized support that sometimes the school often doesn’t have the ability to give.”
The TFA teachers are hired upon completion of their college education and receipt of their bachelor’s degree.

Mascareñaz, who is now the regional district director, said in an interview that Gallup was one of six rural areas in the U.S. Teach for America serves. The teachers have been coming here since 2001, and more than 300 teachers have taught one or two years at Chee Dodge Elementary, Miyamura High School, Churchrock Elementary, Gallup Mid School, Stagecoach, Rocky View, Indian Hills Elementary or Gallup Central High School.

Educational inequity is our nation’s greatest injustice, according to the Teach For America Web site. Mascareñaz said rural poverty is often overlooked because of the focus on inner-city poverty.

“The problem in rural America is that it isn’t a part of our national narrative,” Mascareñaz said. “We’re producing kids who don’t know they can succeed. That’s critical. We can’t just focus on inner cities. Rural America is a large part of this country.

“We know that many of the teachers won’t be teachers all their lives, but through their experience with us, they leave, committed to the idea of equal opportunity education for low-income students,” Mascareñaz said. “And we do have teachers who stay here committed to teach students in this area.”

One of the teachers who has been teaching for more than a year for the Gallup-McKinley School District is Sarah Gallagher.

Gallagher, 23, has been teaching math and science to sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade gifted students. A graduate of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., Gallagher majored in third-world studies in Africa and the Mideast and minored in music and environmental studies. She chose Gallup over working in the inner city schools, because “the desert gets under your skin,” she said. She worked as a whitewater river guide in Moab, Utah, for one season and found she was drawn to interpreting the surroundings, geography, river system and information to the clients on the raft — in other words, teaching.

Getting in to Teach For America wasn’t easy, she said. There are steps of interviewing that have to be completed, including a paper, phone and group interview. But she was inspired by a recruiter who came to her college and wanted to try teaching.

“I always have seen myself in a teaching position,” Gallagher said. In the evening, she attends Western N.M. University to work on her Level 1 license and her master’s degree in special education.

Meghan Gibas is also a TFA teacher at Miyamura High School. She teaches 10th-grade biology and has been here 1 1/2 years. Gibas, 23, is from Old Saybrook, Conn., and is a George Washington University graduate. She majored in biology and anthropology and now she teaches ecology and genetic subjects to her class.

“I love it because it’s challenging,” she said. “I’ve seen growth in my ninth-grade students who I taught last year and have moved up with me.”

Most of her students this year are 15-year-old and are special to her because she has a brother named Jeffrey in the 10th-grade back in Connecticut.

She became interested in TFA when, as a freshman at George Washington University, she went to tutor second-graders a couple of days a week in a Washington inner-city school.

“The school had a library with only a couple of books on shelves and no heat. It opened my eyes to the educational inequality in this country, and I was moved to take action.”

She said she came from a “wonderful” public education school and was inspired by her parents. She decided to teach in Gallup because she wanted to see a new part of the country and was drawn by the anthropology here.

She sees herself teaching for a couple more years, but says it’s not her final career path.

“I’m interested in medicine,” she said and said she probably will go back to school and pursue a medical career.

But, she added, one thing TFA has done for her, is she will always be cognizant of the educational inequality in the U.S., and be inspired to help make a difference.

On the Net: www.teachforamerica.org