Teachers revive Rio Grande City kindergarten

Tears stream down the little girl‘s face as she cries for Ms. Ronnie. The child is led by the hand to a short table on the far side of the darkened room, away from where her classmates are well into nap time.

On the table is a setup of beans and chicken with rice where Ronnie Rodriguez, better known as Ms. Ronnie, her daughter Linda and another teacher are settling in to dig into the leftovers. With the children fed and falling into a slumber, the tin bowl has just enough servings to feed them all.

"You want a cracker?" Ms. Ronnie offers in a gentle voice once she settles the sniffling girl into a small chair beside her.

The child shakes her head. She doesn‘t want food; she just wanted to be close.

"She‘s attached to her," Linda says.

And she's not the only one. The teacher has endeared herself to this Starr County community. Ms. Ronnie, 47, and director Becky Falcon took a daycare no one wanted and turned it into a blossoming early education program. Ms. Ronnie, now the primary care giver, has worked at the First United Methodist Church's day care in Rio Grande City since 1982.

At this humble, church-run day care, the children don‘t need flashy talking gadgets by Leapfrog or Baby Einstein to succeed in education. Simple games and one-on-one attention can do the same; it‘s just going to take hard work from a dedicated pair of teachers to do it.

The day care is part of the Texas Early Education Model program. Through this program, they are given a simple curriculum of songs and games that teach their school-aged children syllables, sentence structures, spelling, letters and shapes. Of the 57 children enrolled, eight are school aged. The rest are infants and toddlers.

"The purpose of the program is that all the kids in all the different (early education) schools all learn the same thing, so that when they go to public school the teachers aren‘t going to have as many problems," Falcon said. "They‘re going to be comfortable and ready to learn. It‘s to get them all on the same plane."

Falcon is also toward the end of the process to get the day care certified by the Texas Education Agency.

But the day care wasn‘t always on this path. It was opened in 1947 by a pastor‘s wife. Then, it was a one-room operation housed in the church‘s basement. For 50 years it graduated small classes of 10 or so children annually until it closed in 1997, then seen by some as a non-viable church venture.

Ms. Ronnie, 47, had attended the day care as a child and began working there after high school along side her mother, who was head of the facility. She had an attachment to it and its closing was a tough thing to see, she said.

One year into working at a large day care program in Houston, she got a call from Becky Falcon, a former oil and gas worker who retired in 1997. She had gotten her teaching certificate years ago via dual enrollment in high school in Huntington Beach, Calif. She wanted to finally put it to good use and re-open the facility.

"I said ‘I‘ll bring my license, you bring yourself, and we‘ll see if we can reopen it,'" Falcon remembers.

It is now housed in two areas, in the church‘s renovated basement and in a donated former hospital just behind the church. It was the first hospital in the city and the same one Ms. Ronnie was born in.

But now she and Falcon are giving new life to the building. Over the years they‘ve painted rooms, maintained the facilities and decorated. It‘s quaint, but homey. One room is almost bare and used for the children to play in when it rains. It's just enough room for a tricycle or two to roam comfortably while the others play. The main classroom has small lockers and enough space for each child to spread out a mat and blanket at nap time. That space wasn't always there. The women knocked down one wall and combined two rooms when they took over.

It hasn‘t been an easy job for them. Falcon picks Ms. Ronnie up from her home just before 6 a.m. every morning. Ms. Ronnie starts cooking breakfast while Falcon checks the rooms for bugs, leaks and untidy spots. When the other teachers start arriving around 7:30 a.m., Falcon tends to her director‘s duties. They work until 5:30 p.m. or later every day. It‘s a labor of love, though.           "I can't do it without her. She can‘t do it without me. If anything happens to either of us this place is...closing I think," Falcon said. "She was out two days this week and it seemed like a week."

There‘s little money to go around. The fees paid by the children‘s parents are just enough to pay the salaries of the center‘s seven staff, the bills and the cost of food. They are part of the federal food program but it only covers the cost of the lower income children. On this day, Falcon is thrilled because she learned the school might receive its first laptop computer to help manage operations. She‘s hoping to find a good deal and hopefully afford wireless Internet access, too.

But when it comes down to it, Falcon says they need little more than games, songs and their time to teach the children.

"It‘s a really, really cool thing," she said of the school‘s revitalized approach. "And they get it. They learn."

Sandra Gonzalez covers features and entertainment for The Monitor. You can reach her at (956) 683-4427.