New San Benito High School teachers took seats on a yellow school bus last week and bumped along local roads to see the parts of Hollister and Tres Pinos that their students call home.
The 14 teachers, a behavioral specialist and a speech and language pathologist took the “community tour”—narrated by longtime Hollister resident and Assistant Principal Adrian Ramirez—last Friday as part of their final day of the “New Teacher Academy,” a paid week of instruction designed to introduce employees to the campus.
“We wanted to make sure that we gave them a good overview of where every student comes from,” Ramirez said. “I think more than ever it’s just so important that our teachers, our staff, understand where our students spend their time when they’re not at school.”
With a microphone in hand and dressed casually in jeans and cowboy boots, Ramirez gave practical advice on where to eat and more poignant reflections on the percentages of students that qualified for free meals at campuses feeding into the high school.
Not all the faces in the bus were new to teaching, or even to Hollister. Five were Balers, explained Elaine Klauer, the new assistant principal at the high school.
Others were veteran teachers. All shared the fact that being an instructor at the campus was something they hadn’t experienced before.
For Joanne Carruth, 23, a bubbly, outgoing graduate of San Benito High School, the new teaching position at the site where she was a student about five years ago meant coming home, literally.
“It’s my hometown,” Carruth said.
The budding teacher graduated from the high school in 2010, taught summer school at the site and is now an intern, earning her credential while teaching English classes to freshmen, she said.
Carruth readily gave tips about Hollister to other teachers on the bus, but learned a few things about the town herself.
“I learned there’s new bakeries,” she said. “I didn’t know we had so many bakeries.”
The bus whizzed along Southside Road, past the former home of the sheriff’s morgue, the site of the Pinnacles Community School and a homeless shelter on its way toward Tres Pinos.
As it neared a hill, the assistant principal explained that the road and the orchards they were about to see had been featured in the film “La Bamba,” which was written and directed by San Juan Bautista resident Luis Valdez.
“The first 20 minutes of that movie were filmed right here,” Ramirez said.
The road slithered on across potholes and road patches, past barns and growing trees into Tres Pinos.
“A lot of our agricultural families have been here for generations,” Ramirez said. “The agricultural farming community is definitely a big part of our students’ lives.”
One of the farthest traveling new teachers, Amber Fisher, came from Phoenix, Ariz. to become the school’s second American Sign Language teacher, doubling the school’s teaching staff in that subject with her arrival.
Fisher moved just days before the academy started and was still searching for a place to live, she said Friday afternoon. The high school is what attracted her to Hollister, she said.
“It was the job and the school,” she said. “The culture and the community of the school really drew me here.”
