Texas Schools
November 22, 1963
Elizabeth N. Flores
February 4, 2024
One
Lucy found her first year teaching middle school hard.
Even though she, like most of the teachers,
grew up in South Texas, making friends
with other teachers was not easy.
But over coffee the morning of November 22,
before the school day began, Lucy announced
in the teachers’ lounge some big news.
Her aunt had attended the LULAC Convention dinner
in Houston the night before.
President and Mrs. Kennedy were at the dinner!
Lucy’s aunt saw them up close!
“My aunt and mom talked until midnight about Jackie!
She’s so beautiful, and she spoke in Spanish!”
All morning between classes,
Lucy delighted in telling the teachers
about Jackie. And they couldn’t wait to hear.
Nothing would compare to
her aunt’s first-hand stories
about the First Lady.
Making friends would now be easier for Lucy.
But the Jackie stories stopped after lunch.
With a murdered president,
Jackie’s blood-stained dress, and
Dallas shamed, no one cared about
Lucy’s aunt and her Jackie stories.
Two
The middle school principal
and two of her sixth-grade teachers car-pooled.
The teachers stopped
asking the principal about a year ago
why she didn’t rip the Nixon bumper sticker
off her car.
It was all faded, and he lost!
What was the point?
The principal shrugged or
laughed when they asked.
Once she said
“The South shall rise again…and so will Nixon!”
They all laughed, and the teachers just shook their heads.
After the lunch hour on November 22
the principal broke the news
of the president's assassination on the intercom.
All afternoon she gave several teachers
–including Lucy–a shoulder to cry on.
One of the teachers in the carpool
called her husband to pick her up after school.
The thought of riding in a car with
a Nixon bumper sticker gave her the jitters.
“I live on a very long block,” the nervous teacher
whispered to the other teacher.
“And my neighbors spend a lot of time outside.”
Three
Juana’s eighth-grade teacher asked her
to pick up chalk in
the assistant principal’s office.
Juana walked down the crowded hall.
Teachers were crying, and mothers
were picking up their children,
even though some kids
didn’t want to go home.
Some students were crying too,
although just the girls,
and some of the boys laughed at them.
When Juana reached the office,
the door was open, and the assistant principal
was on the phone with her back to the door.
Juana quietly waited for her to turn around.
The assistant principal was talking
about the president’s assassination.
Juana heard her say “I bet Daddy is happy.”
The assistant principal turned around
and her eyes met Juana’s. She looked coldly
at Juana’s puzzled face, and said
“You should knock when you come to the office.
Eavesdropping is rude.”
Juana froze, but then grabbed the box of chalk
on the chair by the door and quickly headed back
to her classroom. When asked by her teacher
why her face was so flushed,
Juana could only say “It’s such a sad day.”
Four
Twenty years later, Juana was an accomplished
public school teacher with her sights set
on eventually serving as a principal.
She was assigned to the eighth grade at
her old middle school, and the familiarity
deepened when she learned
that her former assistant principal
was now the principal.
At the start of Teacher Orientation Day,
in the midst of welcomes and instructions,
Juana and the principal locked eyes.
The principal flinched.
Elizabeth N. Flores, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, taught for over 40 years at Del Mar College and was the college’s first Mexican American Studies Program Coordinator. Her poems have appeared in the Texas Poetry Assignment, Corpus Christi Writers (2022 and 2023 editions) anthologies edited by William Mays, the Mays Publishing Literary Magazine, and the Windward Review.
School Reunion and Day of Remembrance, March 18th, 2017
Suzanne Morris
January 7, 2024
“They have always had roses here,”
says the man walking ahead of me
toward the big entrance doors.
And I wonder what “always” means:
if it means, since that day it happened,
or, even before that day?
American Beauty reds,
they rise in resplendence,
blessed by the sun’s embrace,
banks of them,
resurrected from ruins,
offspring of this Holy Ground.
There are enough fair blooms,
quivering with life,
to call forth from memory, one by one,
the face of every innocent victim
lost here, then some:
of every person who
lost someone dear
and thought beauty could
never abide here again.
Inside, the crowd swells;
friends reunite, hug, tease each other
as old schoolmates will
some were not even born
when it happened
but what happened
was born into them,
is part of who they are.
Wearing name tags and
holding programs and lunch tickets
paid for in advance
they mingle with spirits
outside auditorium doors
as if this were just an ordinary
school reunion
as if any reunion here
could ever be ordinary.
One white-headed man stands apart,
leaning on a cane,
gazing through the noisy crowd
studying some point in the distance.
For him, it is that day again
when everything changed.
At 3:17 p.m., a silence is kept
to hear the chimes ring:
Eighty years from
the moment it happened.
Note: on March 18th ,1937, a gas pipeline
exploded under the London School in East Texas,
killing several hundred children and half the
faculty. Eventually, the school was rebuilt on
the original site.
Suzanne Morris’ poems have appeared in numerous online journals and anthologies. Aftermath, a survivor’s tale of the London School tragedy (SFA Press, 2016), was her eighth published novel. Ms. Morris makes her home in Cherokee County, Texas.
School
Thomas Hemminger
November 26, 2023
A place where people come to learn,
where everybody gets their turn
to change themselves from the inside out.
Classrooms where questions are good,
where every voice is understood,
for people are not free who cannot doubt.
School is for the growing,
those who strain in search of knowing
what the universe has displayed before their eyes.
May we never let it fail.
Our own past tells the tale,
want of learning is how community dies.
Thomas Hemminger is an elementary music teacher living in Dallas, Texas. His personal hero is Mr. Fred Rogers, the creator of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. It was through America’s favorite “neighbor” that Thomas learned of the importance of loving others, and of giving them their own space and grace to grow.
Our Schools
Milton Jordan
November 19, 2023
One depression era building in our small
East Texas town housed all eleven grades
the state required for graduation on three
red brick clad stories with steep steps to enter
and steeper stairways at each hallway’s end.
Our first postwar bond issue redesigned
and retrofitted that building for the four
years high school now requires and installed ramps
at the entrance, elevators near each stairway,
elementary buildings beyond the stadium.
We gave up, after ‘65, busing
half our students twelve miles to Lincoln High
in a neighboring district, but still approved
a bond with, of course, a smaller margin,
for four much needed new buildings.
Eight years ago a newly elected
school board restructured staff and teacher salaries
more in line with local living expenses
and strong school staff and parent support
has twice returned them to office.
Several attempts by special interest groups failed
to create their own schools and their new effort
depends on the Governor’s oft-defeated scheme,
wrapped in reckless political threats,
to tap a sizable slice of public funds.
Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He co-edited the first Texas Poetry Assignment anthology, Lone Star Poetry, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022