Sunnyview School

Sunnyview School
© Ken Harris 2009

In September, 1974, Sunnyview School had around 115 students, kindergarten through 12th grade. For the elementary grades we followed Calvert School’s curriculum. Calvert School, an accredited day school in Baltimore, Maryland, also furnished materials for home study students, and this decades before the concept became fashionable. High school was done by correspondence through the University of Nebraska. In this way a certain continuity of curriculum was established since the instructional staff itself hailed from Finland, Spain, Scotland, England, France, Canada, Northern Ireland and the U.S. Some of us had teacher training while others had only their availability to recommend them.

The main two-story building at Sunnyview School housed classrooms for first- through eighth-grades. The school office sat on the ground floor where director Honey Pettis and two clerks kept things going. Two principals also kept offices in the building, elementary school principal Jane Barbadillo and high school principal David McConnell. However since Barbadillo and McConnell both had full-time teaching duties, those offices were seldom occupied. Otherwise the building had classrooms for first-through eighth-graders.

Kindergarteners had their own small magic kingdom to the south, separated from the main building by a field of monkey bars, rings and slides. West of the main building lay the swimming pool and the high school class rooms.

The buildings themselves were made of el cheapo hollow clay bricks, made so light you could carry eight at a time. You could probably drop one on your foot with no more than an “oh, damn.” Nothing like the humungous bricks we’re used to in the States. And it wasn’t just the school buying the cheapest commodity they could. This was how bricks were made in Spain. Once in place, workmen covered the bricks with a rough, stucco.

The same el cheapo bricks that formed the buildings also formed the walls surrounding the school, but without the stucco. The bricks were set with wide air spaces between each one. In such a way about fifty percent of the wall was pure hole in the wall so that air could freely flow through without blowing over the barricade. It was just the sort of barrier an enthusiastic kid could ram his motorcycle right through. In fact, that is what one student did the year before we arrived. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, since that would have been unmanly, with the result that he significantly lowered his own I.Q. He didn’t help the wall any, either.

We had no central air or heating. Joanne and I never found the heat oppressive, but, man, it got cold. You always hear about Sunny Spain. Nobody talks much about Warm Spain, especially in winter. We would have all frozen if it hadn’t been for Maguire. Maguire was the school cat, black except for a few white markings. He was in charge of maintaining a mouse-free environment in the kitchen and pantry. In winter he doubled in brass as a hand warmer. Kids smuggled him into class rooms and passed him from lap to lap during the long, boring lectures of which teachers are so fond. Whenever a kid looked directly into a teacher’s eyes, expression bland and inscrutable, you knew he or she had Maguire in hand.

It was totally illegal for us to work at Sunnyview School. We didn’t have green cards. None of us on the educational staff did. I don’t think the Spanish government even had any green cardstock on which they could print any. But we had our cover stories. If the authorities were to raid the school one day, we were to sit in the back of the room and claim that we were only parents, there to observe, while the real teacher had just stepped out. Since we had two children at the school, our cover story might have worked. But how impressed were the authorities going to be if they found six rooms, six observant parents and zero teachers?

The situation was silly. But I trace it to the fact that the Spanish government didn’t like foreigners with their foreign ideas and values. They didn’t trust their influence. We were there during the last year Franco was alive and the first year of Juan Carlos’ rule. But if the government didn’t really like foreigners, it really liked foreign money. Lots of it.. So long as we brought in yankee dollars, pounds, deutschmarks, Swiss francs, we weren’t in much danger of deportation. All the same time, they made it almost impossible to live in the country legally. You were always breaking some law, even if it was having three friends over for brewskis. They were setting it up so that it would be easy to get rid of you if they wanted to.

So even though we sensed that the government didn’t really care, Honey Pettis wanted us to go through the pretext of applying for work permits. This led us to one of Spain’s most noble type of citizens, the gestor (hess.TOR, not jester). Although it seems like a joke, the gestor is a fixer. He fixes things between people and their government. Even when they’re not broken, he fixes them.

We went to the gestor and presented him with our teaching credentials. He was very impressed with Joanne’s. He admired the quality of the paper, the impressive seal and signatures. After much praise, he put both certificates in a folder and kept them. I thought Joanne was going to swallow her tongue.

We never got green cards, and maybe that’s why I can sympathize a bit with the plight of the illegal alien here in Arizona, working without a green card and hoping he can lie or run fast if he gets caught. Oddly enough, the gestor got us Spanish social security, which qualified us for government funded medical treatment in Spain. Since the United Kingdom had a reciprocal agreement with Spain, we were also entitled to government health care when vacationing in England as well. We got our credentials back from the gestor when we were about to leave Spain, almost two years later.

In Spain it’s not so much what you achieve as the motions you go through.