Sylvia Campoy recalls when she first spoke up for fairness. She was about 7 years old and she, her mother and grandmother were at the old downtown Woolworths store. Campoy, who was small for her age, stood in front of the ice cream counter waiting to be served. Yet she was ignored.
Her mother wanted to intercede, but Sylvia's nana waved her off.
"She's got to stand up for herself," her grandmother said.
Finally, tiny, skinny Sylvia piped up.
"I'm waiting for someone to help me," Sylvia said in a loud voice.
She got her ice cream.
Campoy related this story Friday afternoon. We sat to talk about tenacity, perseverance and standing up for what's right and fair.
Campoy, now 61, and a small group of other Tucsonans, have done just that for more than 30 years in the struggle to bring equity and fairness to the students of the Tucson Unified School District. Others include Lorraine Aguilar, Barbara Krider, Annabelle Nuñez, Nellie Suarez, Frieda Baker, attorney Ruben Salter and the original plaintiffs.
People are also reading…
A former TUSD teacher, school board member and director of the city of Tucson's Equal Opportunity Programs, Campoy has been at the forefront of ensuring that TUSD carry out its federal-court-mandated desegregation plan. In the most recent chapter in this three-decade story, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that court oversight of TUSD's desegregation efforts must return. The ruling upended a decision by a Tucson federal judge who said TUSD no longer required court supervision and granted the district "unitary status," which essentially allowed TUSD to end its desegregation programs. Campoy gave a lot of kudos to the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund for its legal assistance.
Campoy said the appeals court's ruling reaffirms what the black and Latino plaintiffs have been saying for years: that TUSD continues to provide unequal services to its students and that court oversight remains necessary.
"The district could be more of an advocate for its students," said Campoy, who was born in Mexico City and whose Tucson-born mother is a descendant of Charles H. Meyer, a Tucson Territorial-era druggist and justice of the peace.
She began her educational activism in the mid-'70s teaching special-education students at Myers/Ganoung Elementary School near East 29th Street and South Swan Road. She soon noticed that Latino students were being placed in her class because of language and ethnicity. It was happening district-wide, she later recognized.
That is the dark history of TUSD, which at one time segregated black students and ignored the educational needs of Latino and black students.
Campoy, as a first-grader at Roskruge, experienced the same. Her teacher wanted to place the Spanish-speaking girl in a special-education class. Campoy's mother fought it and in the end took her out of Roskruge for several years, sending her to Catholic school. Campoy returned to Roskruge in the fifth grade - full of spitfire and English skills to champion equality.
She recalled that at Roskruge she saw that boys were harassing girls. She organized the girls and they marched into the principal's office demanding that the bullying be stopped.
By the mid-'70s, while some changes and progress had come to TUSD, it still lagged in providing equal education to minority students. Several black and Mexican-American parents sued and the district was eventually ordered to improve educational opportunities for minority students.
While TUSD created programs and money was channeled into some of the district's historically minority schools, issues of inequality remained.
So the citizens' oversight committee, on which Campoy served, remained vigilant - constantly urging a reluctant school district to change its ways.
While the district now has a minority-majority student population, Campoy said inequality persists.
The majority of teachers are non-minorities. The majority of students at the district's jewel, University High School, are non-minority. Minority students continue to receive harsher penalties for rules violations, and non-English-speaking students are segregated, she said. Worse, she said, the academic achievement of minority students still lags behind their non-minority peers.
"There has been benign neglect," Campoy said. "The kids are not any better off."
Campoy doesn't plan to let up - to the contrary, she hopes to return as a special-ed teacher.
The little feisty fighter is still waiting for the district to better serve its students.
Ernesto Portillo Jr. is editor of La Estrella de Tucsón. He can be reached at netopjr@azstarnet.com or at 520-573-4187.
