FINDING A WAY THROUGH THE MUD
“It’s a mud day,” Dr. Karen Sanchez-Griego mentioned on our call. It took my brain a few seconds to register what a mud day might be. It was a snow day but with mud.
The entire student body of the Cuba Independent School District (CISD) was working remotely because the roads had turned to mud. I have driven those craggy dust cloud roads around Cuba between Counselor and
Ojo Encino and Torreon.
In my role at New Mexico Appleseed, I have worked for years to try to get USDA summer feeding programs up and running out there and failed entirely because of these roads.
Even in rain-thirsty July, they are axle-breaking with miles of hardpacked dirt gorges and tire-sized cliffs. At its best, it is a death-defying obstacle course for a regular car, much less those gawky and stiff school buses. After the January downpour, it’s just rivers of sludge, making school attendance for students impossible. Days and days of impossible.
The word impossible isn’t terribly menacing or meaningful to Dr. Sanchez-Griego, the superintendent of CISD. She tosses the risk of failure aside like a candy wrapper, entirely focused on the sweet reward of seeing her visions of academic and life success for all children regardless of race, income, gender, or quicksandy mud.
I find leaders like Dr. Sanchez Griego fascinating to study. She has all the ingredients I see as necessary for success as a change-maker: high-risk tolerance, ethics, and empathy. Dr. Sanchez-Griego is brilliant and innovative. She could teach a master class in determination, creativity, focus, ethics, and how to completely ignore the noisy critics in the cheap seats.
When the college counselor at Rio Grande High School said that she couldn’t go to college with ACT scores like hers, but she could work Piggly Wiggly, her parents sat down and said, “’Jita, don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do something.” Apparently, she only needed to hear that once because she went on to go to college, get a teaching certificate and a Ph.D., and is turning around possibly the single most under-resourced and overtaxed school district in the entire state.
In our state, and maybe anywhere, that is big news. Her goal is not just equitable opportunities for her students but equitable outcomes. She’s a scientist and treats every intervention like an experiment.
She is designing interventions based on the data that illustrate the needs of her students and then following up with the data that show if the intervention was effective. Data rules the day. Intellectual rigor and intellectual honesty are non-negotiable parts of any invention. Do the things that work, and don’t do the things that don’t. Simple enough.
This particular phase of her experimental trial is starting to show results.
Between 2018 and 2023, CISD saw a 20% improvement in graduation rates. All students in 8th grade through 12th grade have $15 an hour paid internships in line with what they choose as their future careers.
Eighth graders get paid for two hours every Monday, while 12th graders are everywhere from Rio Rancho to Bloomfield to Farmington and some at Navajo Nation Chapter Houses. They are in hospitals, law offices, restaurants, businesses, and flower shops. CISD even worked with Workforce Solutions to ensure the kids could have these paid learning experiences.
Dr. Sanchez-Griego worked with her amazing staff in the community to create a project-based learning curriculum in the native Dine’ (Navajo) language built around the values of the Dine’ people and Ke’ — the DNA of community in Dine’ that weaves together love, compassion, generosity, positive action, and peacefulness.
CISD created summer programming to keep kids engaged and battle this summer slump. She ensured the pay was equitable across genders and matched the cost of living in Sandoval County. There isn’t a single aspect of CISD that isn’t being scrutinized for problems and solutions. Every detail of her intervention has been thought through. And if it hasn’t, she dives in.
So, the million-dollar question for me is always this: does a community or school district have to have a charismatic wizard to make dramatic and permanent improvements in the academic and life outcomes of the kids who have had some of the highest needs in the least resources for generations? Or can we bottle her risk tolerance, creativity, and curiosity? I would argue that it all goes back to the same three qualities of ethics, empathy, and no fear of failure.
When it comes to making change for New Mexico’s students, putting the child in the center is the only ethical agenda. Fear of looking bad, steering clear of controversial topics, or trying to make all the adults happy are incompatible with effective and ethical leadership. If those things are too much for you, go home. For leaders like Dr. Sanchez-Griego, there is no sweeping bad news under the rug. The only ethical approach is shining a light on the problems and studying how they showed up in the first place.
Dr. Sanchez-Griego saw that the only way forward in her community was to address the real systemic racism and sexism that had been baked into everything from how much people were paid to who got disciplined. She saw this as what was failing the kids, and no matter how controversial and uncomfortable it was, she was going to address it.
Empathy is the other ingredient to successful change. In my work across the state, I’ve noticed a sharp distinction between the empathizers and the judges.
When a child comes to school hungry, do they see that the mom has a cellphone and wonder why she can’t feed her child if she can pay her cellphone bills, or do they get a child a meal and help them start their day? In Dr. Sanchez-Griego’s district, if a student hasn’t attended school for a week, nobody is popping gossipy popcorn. Someone gets in a car, journeys over those rock-strewn roads, and checks on them to make sure they’re OK and figure out how to get them back to school.
Maybe we can’t bottle Dr. Sanchez Griego’s secret potion, but nobody has cornered the market on qualities such as empathy, ethics and fearlessness. As we try to make a better life for New Mexico’s children, maybe we can just start with those. I know I will.
Jennifer Ramo is the founder and executive director of New Mexico Appleseed. She created Appleseed’s first-in-the-nation programs such as the Hunger-Free Students’ Bill of Rights, the Breakfast After the Bell law and the Food Access Navigator project on the Navajo Nation.