It takes a village (including a high school counselor)

by David Safier

Ernesto Portillo wrote one of those slice-of-life columns he does so well in the Sunday Star. It's about a kid named David Yebra, who is actually no longer a kid. He's a 43 year old army Lt. Colonel, "a 1990 graduate of West Point, [who] was named the 2011 United States Army Cadet Command Professor of Military Science of the Year, the most distinguished professor of military science in the country."

As Portillo goes on to say, "Not bad for the son of a Mexican immigrant, who grew up in Menlo Park and attended public schools." Not bad, indeed.

Yebra probably had the stuff to succeed in higher education. He was a good student with a supportive family. But a Cholla High School counselor gave him the opportunity to choose West Point over some other university. What did she do? She selected him to go to a college fair at the UA.

"If Miss Clay had not pulled me out of class and taken me to the UA, I may not have joined the military," said Yebra, 43, during a phone conversation from his university office, where he serves as head of the military science department.

Good teachers and counselors make the kinds of choices Miss Clay made hundreds of times a year. Some bear fruit, others don't. Teachers never really know which is which, but they're dogged enough, they keep trying. Those are the gigantic little things teachers do all the time — not just "great" teachers, but garden variety good teachers who care deeply about their educational mission and the children they come in contact with. I don't know where Miss Clay belongs on the good-to-great-teacher continuum, but she certainly did what the best educators do. She enriched David Yebra's life by giving him the opportunity to make the most of himself.