Metz Teacher & Student Advocacy
Advocacy that Metz students, teachers, and community members have engaged in has not always been in reaction to district decisions. Two notable examples come from our interview with Lupe Ramos, the first being her and Sheila Guzman's dual-language and Montessori initiative. She told us how she felt there were still gaps in opportunity for Metz students, especially those who spoke Spanish as a first language, and how Metz's principal at the time, Jorge Rodriguez, supported their efforts:
"We were empowered with the information that we needed to know as teachers to interrogate the powers that be. We really wanted the best. At that point, we found out that our children, our Latinos, our minority children, even when we were bussing, were not getting as much... There were other things that we gained from bussing. But closing the gaps, it was not happening. So we wanted the best for them and we felt that dual-language was the best thing to do"
She then explained that this dual-language Montessori program did not take off district-wide, until three years ago when AISD started a public Montessori program, with no reference to their earlier efforts.
In our interview with her, Lupe Ramos also detailed the activism that her students took part in following the César Chavez visit to Metz. During the visit, she says, Chavez showed the students his documentary about the negative effects of grape cultivation in California on farmworkers and families in the surrounding area. After learning about this, her students decided to ask the school board if they would stop serving grapes in school cafeterias:
"I don't know how I got away with this, well, but I know how I did, right, because the principal was not one that was coming and saying, "Lupe, you better not go to the board". So I was able to take it as far as I could. And I did, the children wrote letters to the board members and said, please, don't serve us any more grapes in the cafeteria...it was a very good lesson for children to be going in, advocating for themselves and others, and understanding how what they eat is important, and how healthy the food is that they're eating is important"
This request was ultimately denied, which Ramos said she feels may have been because the students who were asking were from east Austin instead of west Austin. Furthermore, she says, despite the significance of César Chavez's visit to Metz, she recalls no representatives from the AISD central office in attendance and no official acknowledgment of the visit.
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Lupe Ramos's students also traveled to the Capitol to support an event advocating for farmworker's rights and marched down what was formally 1st street campaigning for the name to be changed to César Chavez street, which was ultimately successful. Ramos attributed her ability to do this to her previous initiatives which gave her credibility in the district, the support of parents, and notably, the district's possible hesitancy to reprimand a "minority teacher":
"I'm glad that they did leave us alone. And I think because I was a minority teacher, I don't think they would have done anything because I guess I felt like I could also say, you're discriminating against me, and it's very obvious. So I'm thinking that's why they didn't reprimand me for taking the children to the capital to walk for the farmworkers and, you know, that kind of stuff"
From these anecdotes, it appears that AISD's apathy towards its east Austin schools had one potential benefit: leeway for students and teachers to engage with issues that they care about. This, however, raises the question of what could have been accomplished if the Metz community did not have to focus their energy on fighting AISD for decades. How many more student-led initiatives, like the "no grapes" and E. César Chavez Street campaigns, would have been possible?