Going Far, Bringing It Back to Santa Ana

Hers is the story of almost every immigrant child. Born in Mexico, Karla Alcala moved to Santa Ana as a little girl. Her parents found work, secured a place to live and set out to learn the ways of the new country.

At that point, Alcala’s story veers into an area of vast opportunity often unimaginable to her peers. After attending Sierra Middle School, her outstanding abilities took Alcala far from home--to a high-powered East Coast boarding school, then on to Stanford University.

Now, out of a sense of gratitude and obligation, the 23-year-old is back home, teaching in the same middle school she attended as a child.

“I’m so proud that she came back here,” said Alcala’s former guidance counselor, Maria Colmenares. “Let’s face it, after Stanford she could have gone anywhere, to work for a corporation and make a lot of money.”

Alcala is a mishmash of experiences as she stands before primarily Spanish-speaking sixth- and seventh-graders who are struggling to rearrange the alphabet into English words or learn the difference between a city and a state. She is witness to the struggles and poverty of her community but also is steeped in privilege, private fortunes, Ivy League legacies and a $200,000 education.

At Sierra, she says, teachers gave her the skills to compete, and she owes them for every door that ever opened to her.

She excelled at the elite Lawrenceville School, a stone’s throw from Princeton University, because of them. Classes at Stanford were fun, not frightening, because of them.

“Every opportunity, every wonderful experience, absolutely everything I am now I owe to them,” she said. “That’s why I’m here now.”

It’s not the kind of choice many of her classmates made. The number of Stanford graduates who go into teaching below college level is statistically insignificant, university officials say.

The top field of choice for Stanford graduates is business, which includes investment banking, advertising and marketing, where starting salaries range up to $60,000. Next is technology, where a new Stanford grad can command $70,000 plus stock options.

First-year teachers in Santa Ana earned $33,419 last year.

So why is Alcala here? Like many things about this poised young woman, the answer is a mix of the cultures that have shaped her values. Her long-term goal is graduate school, but she wanted a break from the privileged academic life. She longed to be back with the close-knit family she had left eight years earlier, but she wanted to take a stand for the educational values she’s devoted to. And then Santa Ana educators told her how badly she was needed in the schools there.

Her choice hasn’t always been an easy or comfortable one. The way she remembers it, kids were better behaved when she went to school. They had fewer language barriers. They cared more about academics, less about Pokemon and the World Wide Wrestling Federation. The children say they like Maestra--Teacher--and that she is nice--but strict.

Of 21 students in her first-period class, 19 have been in the country less than a year. It is not unusual, Alcala has found, to have children enroll in her class two, three, seven or eight months into the school year.

“But to me this is real teaching,” Alcala said. “Anyone can teach a group of honors students.”

She zigzags among desks, pantomiming, drawing and answering her students’ questions as they look into her serious, dark eyes.

It’s an arduous process for the fledgling instructor. Lessons she has taught, and fully believed they learned, must be repeated. What seems to be a simple task--an assignment to describe a color--will send hands into the air with calls for help.

“They say, ‘Teacher, I don’t understand,’ and I want to say, ‘What do you mean you don’t understand? It’s basic! It’s a color! Just describe it!’

“But then I’ll find out that what they don’t understand isn’t the task but the word ‘describe.’ ”

Her successes are incremental but require such patience and perseverance that she can pinpoint exactly when a student who never before answered a question in class finally raises a hand.

“I have one little girl who literally would get sick from just the fear and stress of coming to school,” Alcala said. “At first she stayed home until I told her parents that, legally, she had to come to school. Then she’d have to go to the nurse’s office about 20 minutes into class, because she had such bad stomach cramps. Now she can not only stay for the school day but is even asking questions.

“To see that happen is the best feeling in the whole world.”

Starting Off Poor, Priority on Learning

Alcala’s family moved to Santa Ana from Guadalajara when she was 4. Moving in with an aunt who had made the migration before them, they struggled to get by.

Her father sold the family jewelry to furnish their first home. They received food stamps to help them eat, and wore secondhand clothes.

“The joke in the family back then was, we would have potatoes and beans for dinner one night but beans and potatoes the next,” said Alcala’s mother, Imelda Gonzalez.

Alcala remembers little of the poverty of those early years. Her memories are mostly of dolls, doting family members and friends.

But the family arrived with one big advantage many Mexican immigrants lack: Both parents had received a full education in the rigorous Mexican public school system. They cared intensely about education, read books constantly and infused Karla with that passion. So strong was her affection for books that when she misbehaved, she was disciplined by not being allowed to read.

She started school the following year at Franklin Elementary in Santa Ana. Her kindergarten teacher, Judy Magsaysay, is now principal at Pio Pico Elementary School. But the principal remembers the bright kindergartner from 19 years ago.

“I knew we had a phenomenal individual on our hands,” Magsaysay said.

Little Karla offered help everywhere. She would help other children with the alphabet, and she offered advice to Magsaysay too.

“On the first day of school, I coaxed the children onto the carpet to tell them what school was about,” Magsaysay said. “So I’m leaning forward and leaning forward in this little chair so I can be closer to their little faces when a hand shoots up and Karla says, ‘Maestra! Maestra! You have to sit up straight because if you don’t you’ll get a hump in your back!’ ”

The family intended to live in the U.S. for a year or so, save money, then move back home to Guadalajara. Alcala, her brothers and mother did move back for a year, but they returned to Santa Ana in 1986 so Alcala could apply for a green card.

The family moved back to the same home on Dresser Street that they had left and resumed their former routine, but to Alcala, then age 10, it didn’t feel the same.

School officials did not know where to place her. And for the first time, she suffered self-consciousness over the gaps in her English fluency.

“Reading a children’s version of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ I said that he was on an ‘ice-land’ ” instead of an island, she said.

“I saw people looking at me funny, but no one said anything. I probably said it that way for a week.”

Even the family’s effort to get a green card for Karla stalled. The U.S. had offered a general amnesty for immigrants who had been in the country before 1986, but Alcala’s absence the year before in Mexico presented a complication. So she applied--again and again over the next eight years until she got it.

“I kept thinking, I’m a good citizen, I’m smart, I’m hard-working, isn’t that what this country says it wants from immigrants?” Alcala said.

Those very qualities eventually brought Alcala to the attention of guidance counselor Maria Colmenares, who foresaw great things for the poised seventh-grader with the straight As.

A Wrenching Time: Letting a Daughter Go

“Karla was like an adult,” said Colmenares, now a counselor at Villa Fundamental School.

Colmenares wanted Alcala to apply for the Boston-based A Better Chance program, which each year selects top eighth-grade students of color to seek scholarships from elite prep schools across the country. More than 2,000 students apply each year for about 300 spots.

The counselor’s proposal would cause an immediate rift in the family.

“In Latino culture the family is very close, and you especially do not send your only daughter alone out into the world,” said Alcala’s mother.

Still, her mother was thrilled by the idea. Her father, Erich Gonzalez, said absolutely not.

Well, said her mother, why doesn’t Karla just apply? After all, she may not even get in. They could talk about it later.

“But I knew she was going, absolutely,” said Imelda Gonzalez, smiling over at her husband. “I had decided--it was too good of an opportunity to miss.”

Imelda Gonzalez is determined and decisive, much like her daughter. There is a way to do things: Families should be close, children should study, money should not be wasted. Imelda Gonzalez, a bookkeeper, and her husband have worked alternate shifts for 20 years so that one of them would always be home with the children.

But to the father, sending a 14-year-old girl to a school nearly 3,000 miles from home was not only breaking with cultural tradition, it was courting untold moral dangers.

“A first I just said no,” Erich Gonzalez said. “I worried that she would be influenced by typical American culture--I worried about drugs.”

Then their daughter was accepted. Her mother said, why not let Karla try it? If it doesn’t work, she could always come back.

Showing the Students Karla Then, Karla Now

Alcala has used the story of her scholarship to inspire her students. To reinforce the notion that she has the same roots they do, she once showed them a videotape of a herself as a student at Sierra.

They found the sight hilarious, their straight-standing teacher as a child. They don’t understand all the details of her story, but now they know what a scholarship is. They know that Maestra won two scholarships--and that they can do it too.

The idea, however, is a seedling yet to reach its full growth--that education is not just for the wealthy, that students can strike out from Santa Ana and if they so choose, also come back.

Would they do what she did? Go to school in another state to get a good education?

They are practical. “I would do it, but I would take my family with me,” said Oscar Martinez Alexander, 12.

“She told us she missed her mother,” another boy said.

After a moment, a few boys shake their heads; they would miss their mothers too.

Thinking East Coast and snow, Karla and her mother bundled up in their warmest woolen sweaters and flew out to New Jersey.

“We got off the plane and it was 98 degrees with about the same humidity--it was August,” Alcala remembered, laughing. “But we didn’t know anything about the East Coast.”

Everything was different--not just the tree-lined streets and red brick buildings from the 1800s. At Lawrenceville, the average class size is 12 and students are from 38 states and 18 countries. The school offers year-abroad programs in Europe or China, ecology programs based in the mountains and another on an island in the Bahamas. Its entire senior class last year went to college.

“Back East, it seems as though going to college is just a natural step in life,” she said. “Where I’m from, you have to live a day-to-day plan because you don’t have everyday guarantees. A lot of my friends had to worry about whether their parents would have a job.”

The wealth of her classmates was muted by the weather--everyone wore jeans and sweaters. Vacations, however, brought more telling signs, as classmates headed for summer homes on Martha’s Vineyard.

Alcala felt her life had been transformed. But as much as she missed her family, in other ways she felt at home--especially after her first set of grades: A’s.

“After that I felt like I fit in,” Alcala said. “I knew that I got in because I’d earned it--not because my father had bought the school a new gym or something like that.”

From Lawrenceville, she found it a fairly easy transition to attend Stanford.

“At Stanford, they asked me to write an essay about achieving the American Dream,” Alcala said. “For me, I achieved it the day I was accepted into Lawrenceville.”

When graduation neared, however, the decision loomed about her next step. Her long-term plan is to become a child psychologist, but after eight years of rigorous study and a long-distance relationship with her family, she called former guidance counselor Colmenares for advice.

Colmenares told her that public education needs her. Latina girls need to see they can be more than mothers and wives. Poor students need to learn that if they pair hard work with dreams, they can do things they never imagined. She would help Alcala apply for an emergency credential permitting her to teach.

Making ‘Schoolie’ a Badge of Prestige

The arguments fit in with Alcala’s firmly held values.

“I don’t believe you get anything for free,” she said.

She moved in with her family, which had since moved to a Tustin condo. She now tries to make up for time lost with her two younger brothers, Eduardo, 13, and Jorge, 19.

And she spends her days at Sierra, a school that because of the language barriers facing its students--more than half are not fluent in English--is one of the lowest-performing in the county.

The boys play with finger skateboards when Alcala’s not looking, sniff miniature bottles of cologne hidden in jacket pockets and break into spontaneous imitations of their wrestling idol, “The Rock.” The girls are better behaved, working together in groups, but not necessarily better students.

Sierra is a year-round school, and Alcala’s session ends in August.

So, through the summer, she’ll keep fighting the impossible fight, trying to make it cool to be smart. Her students want to please her but dread nothing more than being labeled “schoolie” by their friends.

Then she remembers the girl who used to get sick at the thought of school and now raises her hand to ask questions.

Come fall, Alcala will be back.