Town’s New High School Makes Grade With Students

It used to be so difficult--those darn, otherworldly mornings, up at 4:30 a.m., stumbling out to meet the big yellow bus. When Jessica Garcia looks back on her high school years, she probably will not feel much nostalgia for those moments. She is one of the last veterans of the longest school bus ride in America.

“A lot of times, we’d laugh a lot on the bus,” said Garcia, 17, a senior, describing the slow 90-mile trek each morning and again each afternoon through the wild desert mountains of her home. “But a lot of times, we didn’t feel like having fun. We’d just try to sleep, wanting to be home.”

When school reopens here this month in this remote border community, with its friendly residents and its dusty edge-of-the-Earth quality, Jessica and her 44 high school classmates will savor a small miracle: the new Big Bend High School, right here, only minutes from their homes.

It was built for $550,000 on the thinnest of shoestring budgets, with grants and donations from people around the country who were impressed with reports of the students’ struggle to get an education. And with its dedication Saturday, it offers the youths something they have never had--a place to belong to.

“We will have lab facilities, all under one roof, bathrooms even, all those things everybody has in a normal school,” said Kathy Killingsworth, who serves as both the high school principal and the superintendent of the Terlingua School District. “It’s been a community, state and nationwide affair, getting this school built. Everybody wanted to get the kids off the bus.”

For many years, however, it was a given: Children who lived in Terlingua or nearby Lajitas or the Big Bend National Park--one of the most rugged and least-visited parks in America--enrolled through the eighth grade at the Terlingua Elementary School. Then, with no other choice, they boarded the bus and headed north up lonesome Route 118 to attend high school in the small town of Alpine.

Along the way, they passed wild turkeys, deer, the occasional ferocious javelina and the colorful peaks that rise 5,000 and 6,000 feet above the sagebrush--Elephant Mountain, Packsaddle Mountain, Hen and Egg Mountain. But even the most starkly beautiful scenery can fail to fascinate on the 180th round trip, and the school dropout rate was discouraging.

“Oh, we worried so much about it,” said Nereida Jurado, a waitress whose eldest child, Miguel, 14, is a freshman. “We kept wondering, ‘Oh, my God, how will we ever survive the bus?’ ”

The longest bus ride actually ended last fall when school officials, finally certain they could finance construction of a new school, hauled mobile homes to the Terlingua site to serve as temporary classrooms. That strategy, of course, did little to promote school spirit, and the faulty air-conditioning and cramped quarters were further inconveniences to the students. But all that is behind them now, and Big Bend High School, “Home of the Roadrunners,” seems like a palace.

By most standards, the new facility is tiny, with only six classrooms. But as students and parents toured the facility recently, they cried out with joy at the sparkling white walls, the neat cabinets and gray carpeting, the new construction smells. Getting the structure built was truly a community effort. Concerned residents used their trucks to haul in equipment; fathers of students did the concrete work.

“I’m pretty excited about starting school again,” said a beaming Gina Lujan, 16, a sophomore. “Everybody is. I love to be involved in school.”