Herrera Elementary namesake brightens ribbon-cutting ceremony

Stories about how an uncle jumped onto a train in México City and held onto the outside until he arrived in Colorado, or other uncles fleeing the Mexican Revolution and joining the U.S. Army at Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas flowed easily from the mind of Juan Felipe Herrera on Monday morning.

Or looking at family photos collected by his mother and grandmother and seeing chapters of his family history in each.

“We all have beginnings,” said Herrera during the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the $41 million Juan Felipe Herrera Elementary School in southeast Fresno.

“It’s a long story. It’s a beautiful story. It’s a story of hope, of imagination, or perseverance,” Herrera told about 100 invited educators and community leaders.

Those stories, said the 73-year-old poet/author/activist, “define us.” And, they should be shared, he added.

Herrera hopes the new school – a 36-classroom facility bathed in vibrant colors sitting on 17 acres and housing a United Health Centers clinic – should inspire its students to thrive.

A school with classrooms “as big as a football field” and a cafeteria that “looks like 17 restaurants” can feed a student’s appetite for education, he said.

“We want to show it to the children. We want them to flourish. We want them to be like these big green fields, alive in brilliant solar power,” said Herrera, who has taught at Fresno State and UC Riverside.

Fresno Unified Superintendent Bob Nelson said the new school offers more than a regular curriculum. Instruction will integrate arts, science, technology, engineering, math and language arts, he said.

“Our students here are really given a chance to do something working on project-based learning,” said Nelson. “They’ll get a world-class education.”

Praise from fellow educators

Longtime educators like Venancio Gaona, Raúl Moreno and Bertha González were among those who showed up for the ceremony.

Gaona, who helped convince the school board to name the school after the first Latino to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, said the tribute is fitting.

“The students here have an exemplary person in terms of utilizing education as a means to make their life worth living,” said Gaona, a former Spanish-language instructor at Fresno City College. “Herrera can be an inspiration, a hope and goal-setting person to the community.”

González – whose brother, David González, served as the first principal of neighboring Elizabeth Terrónez Middle School – met Herrera when she was teaching at Fresno State.

“I knew the students loved him, and they were just mesmerized by him,” said González. “I loved that his soul was not with the institution but with the students. That was very inspiring to me as a Latina.”

González said Herrera’s inspiration probably led her nieces, Chalomé and Maía González, to write, illustrate and publish ‘Elote Man Goes to College,’ an award-winning book.

She was excited to get to Herrera Elementary for the ceremony because “it was like walking into one of the schools in México. I mean, the colors, the blending. And then to drive around a corner and see Terrónez (Middle School) over there.”

Moreno, who was instrumental in building Fresno State’s programs to help migrant and undocumented students, also saw Herrera’s interaction with students.

“My first impression of Juan Felipe was his heart, and the way he motivated and inspired our youth,” said Moreno. “He always found a way to engage and include and inspire young people to be what they want to be.”

Moreno, who was part of the committee that recommended the new elementary school on Church near Peach be named after Herrera, said there were two reasons he supported the name.

“One, because he is a good example to follow; but No. 2, so that our young people follow that inspiration and see that our youngsters see themselves in the images of the schools and that they know that they too can be like Juan Felipe Herrera,” he said.

Carol Padilla, a Fresno Unified teacher on special assignment for English learner services, has never met Herrera but knows about him.

“He’s so inspirational and eloquent, just the way he can compose his words right there on the spot,” said Padilla. “We all, as you know, have a story. And he made me think about how do we put my family’s stories on paper before my mother passes on so that we all have a story to tell?”

Padilla said that is a strong message for all.

Dr. Juan Rangel knew Herrera when both were in graduate school in 1975 at Stanford.

“We were both studying anthropology, and he was just always a very vivacious guy, very open, and a funny personality,” said Rangel. “We took a linguistics class together and found out that we had a syndrome.

“It’s called a simultaneous phonological retrieval system, which means that we could access both systems of language,” said Rangel, who reconnected with Herrera when both ended up at Fresno State.

Rangel calls Herrera “linguistically a very imaginative person who just uses words bilingually without hesitation.”

“That’s the beauty of language, and that’s the beauty of Juan Felipe.”

Sixth school with Latino/Latina name

Herrera Elementary is the seventh school in Fresno Unified to be named after a Latino/Latina, most of them after 1991.

▪ Miguel Hidalgo Elementary School opened in 1980 in temporary buildings, until a new building was completed in 1991. The school is named after the father of México’s independence.

▪ Ezekiel Balderas Elementary School, which opened in 1991, was named after a popular outreach consultant at John Muir Elementary who went out of his way to find clothes for needy students. He died of leukemia in 1989 at age 38.

▪ Elizabeth Terrónez Middle School opened in 1996. It was named after a 21-year district veteran who was a principal at Bullard, Hoover and Roosevelt High. She died in 1992 after a 5-year battle with cancer. She was 48.

▪ The César E. Chávez Adult Education Center opened in 2000 after community efforts to name what would become Sunnyside High after the farmworker leader. The school board opted to name new schools in the order they were completed.

▪ Mario G. Olmos Elementary School opened in 2007 at Chestnut and Kings Canyon. It was named after the Fresno County judge who died in an automobile accident in 1990.

▪ Phillip J. Patiño School of Entrepreneurship, on North Clark Street, opened its doors in 2015 as a high school with an entrepreneurial project-based curriculum. Patiño spent most of his educational career at Fresno Unified as a teacher and administrator at nearly a dozen schools in the district.

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