What are you doing next? When do you start? These are the questions I keep getting when I tell people that I’ve decided to resign from UTSA and the TRiO program. Sometimes it’s easy to launch into a new opportunity without taking a moment to reflect and appreciate. So while I’m so excited to answer all those questions, the past year with my students deserves a blog post of its own.
A year ago, I moved back to my hometown. At the time I didn’t know what I was going to do, I just knew I wanted to work with the students. To me, they were the most vulnerable part of the community after the school shooting. As fate would have it, there was an open TRiO program coordinator position at the University of Texas San Antonio, and it would place me in the hallways of Uvalde High School. The Uvalde TRiO program had suffered the past five years due to COVID, lack of organization, and inability to connect with the demographics of the community.
I had prior experience working with a similar college access program, Upward Bound, and I believed in the mission of TRiO. I’d also worked in the college access and student success sectors of college athletics, so I decided to take on the role. I had one goal for the year; to reestablish the program’s presence by giving the students as many good experiences as possible. By the end of the year our program numbers reached full capacity with a waitlist.
Here’s some highlight locations from the year:
- Texas A&M San Antonio and Hopscotch Museum
- UTSA Main and Downtown campuses
- The Alamo
- San Jacinto Community College
- Seismique
- NASA Space Center
It’s not easy to work with high school students. It’s especially difficult when you’re trying to do it in a grieving town who just went through something no town should have to experience. Two months into the job, I experienced a personal hardship of losing my grandmother, and so I was grieving too. We grieved together, experienced together, and learned together. After working with the Uvalde Coyotes, I learned a couple things:
- You have to build strong relationships first. They have to know you care about them before they’ll care about anything you try to teach them.
- You have to give them autonomy. High school is so structured they rarely have a say in what they do and where they go. Give them a space to choose. They will appreciate and respect you more.
- Meet the students where they are at. There has to be a social connection in every thing you ask of them. Most of these kids are COVID babies. Their social development occurred virtually. Teach them it’s cool to care about their futures. I took them to museums, but I took them to museums that were interactive and digitally based. Make that connection for them, and they’ll start to look at the world differently.
Lastly, I want to say thank you. Thank you to UTSA for giving me a role that allowed me to move home on my terms.
Thank you to my TRiO team for supporting me through the hardest year of my life after I lost my grandma last August. Thank you for doing it again when my great grandma passed this March.
Thank you for giving me a space I could let out my grief so that I could be strong enough to do the same when my students brought their grief to me.
Thank you to my students for showing up when the whole country would understand if you didn’t want to. Thank you for bringing open minds to every opportunity and university I put in front of you. There is no blueprint for how to navigate the year after a school shooting, but I watched all of you do it…together. Despite it all, you moved forward with an Adelante attitude. So most importantly, thank you for teaching me resilience.
Adelante.
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