Schools, especially small ones in rural towns dotting the Colorado landscape, tend to describe themselves like being a family.
Five educators at the Sierra Grande School take it a little more literally.
Tiffany Paine, Brooke Paine, Cody Paine, Sarah Paine, and Travis Paine, are ready to start a new year at the school, with the stunning Sangre de Cristo mountain range in its backyard.
One recent weekend, Tiffany Paine and her husband, Travis, were driving from Blanca in the San Luis Valley to Denver when Travis said, “We’re going to talk about anything except school.”
Within a couple of minutes, though, that’s exactly what the couple were doing.
“I guess it’s our lives,” said Tiffany.
The preschool through 12th grade school (“home of the Panthers”) is, for all intents and purposes, home for most of the Paine family. Travis (elementary principal), his wife Tiffany (Kindergarten teacher) and their two children, Brooke (high school English teacher), Cody (high school social studies teacher) and Sarah Paine, elementary school classroom aide married to Cody, put their hearts and souls into the school in one of the prettiest and poorest areas of Colorado. But they get back in return, too.
It’s a family thing, going way back
In such a small, rural school, everybody pitches in. Today, normally Sarah Paine would be tutoring fourth and fifth graders in science, but that teacher is helping Mrs. Payne — Tiffany — her mother-in-law, on a kindergarten field trip, so Sarah is subbing.
“We all play a role and help each other out,” Sarah said, turning to teach fourth-grader Edwin how to make mathematical estimates.
Travis, Sarah’s father-in-law, is not just the elementary school principal. He’s the backup school bus driver and lunchroom server. “I serve salad bar every day,” he said.
His wife, Tiffany, the kindergarten teacher, always wanted to be a teacher, even when she was little.
“I had a chalkboard on my bedroom wall,” she laughs, wearing a comfortable T-shirt emblazoned with the word TEACH. “I credit myself for my brother being smart.”
But teaching in the Paine family goes way back. Tiffany’s great-grandmother was a teacher in the tiny La Jara in south-central Colorado, and her mother was a special education teacher. Travis’s grandmother was a teacher. She lost her husband in a mining accident and had seven children.
“She put herself through college,” said Travis. “She was a rancher and a teacher. She’s one of my heroes.”
As devoted Tiffany and Travis are to teaching, they told their own kids, Cody and Brooke, not to go into teaching. It’s a very tough profession, especially nowadays. Tiffany said, “You’re more than a teacher, sometimes you're a mom and a grandma and a nurse and a counselor.”
Cody and Brooke didn’t listen.
‘That’s why we do it.’
Brooke Paine, the high school English teacher, has a no-nonsense, yet easy-going manner. Her students seem to really like her.
“Brooke is my champion,” said Aleigha, a student in her class. “She checks in with me and makes sure my grades are good. She helps me when I need help. She listens to me talk.”
Brooke’s classroom backdrop is Mount Blanca, its snow-capped peaks dazzling on a bright sunny day. But the students’ eyes are trained on their teacher, who also gets top marks from students like Sophia, 17.
“She really tries her best to make sure you understand what you're learning and not just memorize it, or you know, take a test and move on. She makes sure you comprehend it really well.”
Brooke’s brother Cody, who admits to being “an eighth grader at heart,” used to teach middle school and is the high school social studies teacher this year. Asked about what the biggest misconception about teaching is, Cody said that educators “get the summer off.” He said that teachers work the same number of hours of a 12-month ‘9 to 5’ job only instead crammed into nine months. Many educators, especially in rural Colorado, take extra jobs in the summer to make ends meet. And the job can be exhausting.
“I get asked 1,000 questions a day and I have to think about 1,000 questions a day and be able to answer them,” he said.
But Cody said he loves teaching (and he coaches five sports) and can’t imagine any other job. He said he can go home and complain about 50 things that happened during the day but “most days there’re at least one or two things where a kid tells you something or you're able to help somebody or a kid finally gets it — and that's why we do it. That's why we do it right there.”
Meeting kids’ basic needs is first
Cody, who is now pursuing his Master’s to get his principal’s license, knows that building strong relationships with kids is primary. He said he learned that from watching his dad, Travis, helping the older kids with homework on the school bus as they travelled to basketball games.
“I remember seeing how my dad treated them,” Cody said. “He taught me that the kids are not just numbers, they’re not just statistics, they’re not just test scores. They’re people with real problems … to be sensitive to that because if you can't help them with their real problems, they're definitely not going to come in and learn history.”
More than 80 percent of the students in Sierra Grande School qualify for federal free and reduced-price lunch.
“We have kids that live in campers and they have no running water, they have no Internet, they only have solar electricity and it doesn’t work all the time,” said Brooke. “We have kids who come here to shower. Sometimes the meals that they get here, that's all they get. Most of our kids come from a broken home of some sort.”
Brooke wants her students to know school is a safe space and she’s always there to listen to them.
“I just want them to know that they are safe and they are loved no matter what, no matter where I go or no matter where they go, they are loved by not just me but my whole family and we care about them.”
Travis said he’s seen Brooke and Cody buy lunches and dinners for kids who need it, even shoes.
“I’m extremely proud of them for that.”
… and maybe a trip to Hawaii?
Travis’ wife Tiffany said the job nowadays requires a lot of patience and compassion. She advises her kids and daughter-in-law not to get too emotionally involved.
“But you always do,” she said. “You always tell yourself I'm not going to go home and think about it, but you always do. I spend a lot of nights and a lot of summers and a lot of weekends thinking about it. There’re little lives with tons of needs, and it's just hard to turn that off.”
Today, her classroom is buzzing with kindergarten energy. One little girl just snuggles up, resting her head on Tiffany’s chest as she sucks a finger. Each year, Tiffany and her students take an imaginary trip to Hawaii. The classroom becomes an airplane, a flight simulator flips on. They talk about ocean life, have a luau complete with fancy drinks with umbrellas and do the hula.
“A lot of them don't get to go anywhere,” she said. “The furthest they've been is Alamosa.”
Some good ol’ family trash talking
Cody is four and a half years older than Brooke, and they have a fierce sibling rivalry, one that comes with a fair amount of trash talking.
“I disrupt Brooke’s class all the time just for fun,” Cody jokes.
Brooke groans.
“Sometimes they (students) need a good laugh and they need to get a break…he’s got OK timing.”
When Brooke was a novice teacher, she said her dad used to try to get her to do this or that in the classroom. It was, after all, his classroom for many years, teaching the same subject. But Travis said he’s learned to pull back and let his daughter be her own teacher.
“We understand each other on Shakespeare,” Brooke said. “We're good with that. He likes the classics a little bit more. I'm definitely more young adult lit type stuff, so we clash a little bit, but it works out.”
Brooke said she sometimes catches herself doing things just like her father did, like sitting on the edge of a student’s desk.
“It’s like having a ghost of him, just always in there.”
Still, much to her dad’s chagrin, Brooke doesn’t teach “Huckleberry Finn.” (“It makes him so mad.”)
With so many Paines in the building, a student named Bogar said the family has communication tentacles everywhere.
“Like downstairs, the Paines from down there will tell the Paines up here (if students are getting into mischief) and then the Paines from up here will scold us,” he laughed.
Travis sees advantages to students having different Paines at different levels of learning.
“For example, if Brooke was having an issue with a student, she could come to us and say, ‘What did you guys do? We could say ‘Well, this really worked or this didn’t work’ and we can give some advice.”
When asked if they talk shop outside of school, everyone laughs.
“That’s pretty much all we talk about,” said Brooke. But Travis insists the family draws the line if, for example, he and his wife Tiffany have professional differences of opinion.
“I tell her, you know, ‘I’ll be in my office tomorrow because we’re not going to talk about it at home.’” They both laugh.
But the school by the mountains and the students in it bring the Paines a lot of joy - they love the special gifts or hugs from old students at the local Walmart.
“Our goal is to make our own little corner of the world a better place and help those kids around us.”
