Latino teens find a reason for learning

Article Published: Sunday, May 25, 2003 - 12:00:00 AM MST By Diane Carman, Special to The Denver Post

Yolando Vallejo didn't care. The Rifle High School student said she never felt like she belonged in school. School seemed irrelevant.

"I had family problems," she said. "I always learned a lot when things happened to me." School was not happening.

So she decided she was going to quit, get a job, do something real.

Then the unexpected happened.

School got real.

Rifle High School Spanish teacher Maria Carrion-Kozak saw some information about a program at the University of Denver Center for Teaching International Relations. She was the adviser for the International Affairs Club. This looked interesting.

Carrion-Kozak is from Venezuela, and, as it turned out, the 20 students who joined the club were all Latinos - some first-generation immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador.

In many ways, the club was a refuge for them. Many were struggling with English, and some were barely passing their courses.

Most knew what it was like to feel isolated and foreign even in their own hometown. In the club, they translated for each other. In the club, they stuck up for each other.

Elizabeth Beindorff, project director for the DU World Affairs Challenge, invited them to participate in a statewide competition for a student project on world hunger.

But International Affairs was just a little club at a rural school with no money. It seemed impossible.

No problem, Beindorff said. She offered to waive the registration fee. She sent the materials and urged them to try.

Carrion-Kozak admits she was freaked.

"I was not prepared for this at all," she said. "I'm a Spanish teacher. I have no background in this."

But the students were eager, so she enlisted Kim Goossens, a school board member, to help with the project, and they went to work.

The kids began doing research after school. None of them had a personal computer at home, so most of the work was done at the homes of Carrion-Kozak and Goossens.

The students identified the 25 hungriest countries in the world and the causes of hunger in each of them. They learned that 1 billion people don't have enough to eat, that nearly half of them are children.

Once the students began to realize the scope of the problem, they mobilized quickly.

They organized a hunger strike at school, asking students to forgo lunch to experience what it's like to be hungry. They urged them to contribute their lunch money for hunger relief. They raised nearly $400.

They volunteered in a soup kitchen. They researched the hunger relief organization Heifer International, and used their money to buy a water buffalo to help starving villagers in the developing world. And they wrote and performed a skit, complete with a video presentation and music produced by a student rock band and the school choir.

Then they held more fundraisers, this time to pay for transportation to Denver for the competition in March at DU.

Despite all their work, they were prepared to get creamed.

Many of their competitors were from tony suburban schools. Some of them were from gifted-and-talented programs. They were just poor Latino kids from Rifle.

They smoked them.

On Thursday, they brought their winning project, "Giving a Face to Hunger," to the World Trade Day business conference in Denver.

In front of a painted cardboard set, wearing handmade costumes and few signs of nerves, the students delivered their poignant, powerful dramatization of the plight of the hungry to a roomful of buttondown business types.

When the students finished, the place erupted. The businessmen and women wiped tears from their eyes and gave them a standing ovation.

It wasn't just the skit.

At a time when a third of Latino students don't finish high school and teachers struggle to make school more compelling than a $6- an-hour job in a fast-food joint, a bunch of brown-faced kids with mediocre grades and limited English skills discovered their own remarkable ability.

"A lot of people didn't believe in us because the club is 100 percent Latino. Then we won," Leidy Ruiz said.

"We proved to ourselves and others that we don't all drop out and that we're smarter than we look," said Vallejo, who admits she's decided to stay in school - and not just because of the sudden acclaim.

Winning the competition was great, she said, but to her something else was more important. She discovered that even a bunch of poor kids from Rifle could make a difference.

"To be able to change even one person's life, that was the best thing."

As she spoke, Carrion-Kozak passed a tissue to Beindorff. The tears were welling up again.

They knew just what she meant.

Diane Carman's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. E-mail: dcarman@denverpost.com .