A new grade, a new school!

The first day of sixth grade had arrived at last! I was moving up in the world.

Zia Intermediate consolidated all the students who attended fifth grade from all five elementary schools the previous year. Students would attend this school for the sixth and seventh grades. I remember the assembly on the the first day of school that included the entire student body in the gym. They had the sixth and seventh grades on separate sides of the gym. I remember looking at the class of seventh graders across the way and thinking that next year, I would be sitting over there and I would know the names of every single one of my classmates. I actually wound up just about accomplishing that goal.

So far in this blog, I have only mentioned two of the elementary schools in town that I attended: Hermosa and Central. The other three schools were Yucca, Roselawn and Abo.

Yucca was sort of your average, everyday, run-of-the-mill elementary school. There was nothing special about it. I caught up with someone from Hermosa who started going to school there. I asked him if the cafeteria food tasted good. He said no. "That's why it's called Yuck-uh," I said. (The ironic thing is that the cafeteria food for all the schools was prepared in the same cental location at the junior high school.)

Roselawn was located near the local Catholic church, which was the hub of the Hispanic community. The school's racial makeup was about 99% Hispanic and 1% Caucasian. I had gotten to go there to perform with the sixth and seventh grade choirs. It was strange to look at all the students and only see a couple of white kids. I felt for them, knowing that the other students only likely spoke Spanish during lunch and recess. I mentioned Lud in a previous post. Her father was the principal there.

Abo was our local "historical" school. It was historical because it was the first school in the country that was constructed to serve as a fallout shelter. The entire school was underground. I will have a full-on rant about Abo in a future blog post, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, for the first time ever, I had a locker. I knew where it was located and I knew the combination. There was one problem: It wouldn't open. They had to send maintenance people over to work on it. They couldn't figure out the problem. It took the school a whole week before they decided to re-assign me to another locker. It appeared that I was the only student this happened to.

Otherwise, I had a pretty good first day at school. I got to meet a lot of people I'd never met before, and made some new friends, including someone who had the exact same class schedule as me. For all six periods. I found that for the next three years of school, there was always one person who had the exact same class schedule. I don't know how that happened.

I did meet up with Wild on the first day of school, but we didn't have any classes together, so we really didn't get to pick up our friendship where we left off. I was actually disappointed in that.