Thursday, February 9, 2017
Hart takes 2nd place at WMC finals; Shelby 3rd
Two sections 22 pages
Oceana’s
Page B1
Herald-Journal
Page B1
Alvesteffer earns Scholar-Athlete award Falcons’ senior 1 of 4 Class D selections; 1st Pentwater athlete to ever win MHSAA award
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Proud to be an American
Miguel Quinteros shares how kindness inspired his desire to become an American citizen By Amanda Dodge OHJ Contributing Writer
To become a United States citizen, immigrants must pass a series of tests, interviews, fingerprinting, background checks and more and the financial cost is quite high. One portion of the naturalization test, the section on civics, is comprised of 100 questions, and those applying are given an oral examination of 10 of those questions, and are required to get six correct in order to pass. While, well over 90 percent of applying immi-
grants pass this test without issue, a 2012 study by Xavier University, gave the same test to American citizens, and one out of three failed to answer the required six questions correctly. In 2014, things were not looking much better, as a new poll showed that slightly over a third of respondents could name all three branches of the U.S. government, but the same amount could not name a single one. Worse still, the test was given to high school students in Oklahoma and Arizona, and less than four percent of those students passed.
Yet to Pentwater Public Schools teacher, Miguel Quinteros, citizenship and history are a personal and professional passion that he wishes to impart on those around him, especially his students. He is a proud legal immigrant, and passed the civics portion of his naturalization test by correctly answering only one question in such accurate depth, that the person administering the test learned something they did not know about U.S. history that day. Quinteros was born in the Central American country of El Salvador, and grew up into adulthood during the horrific and violent civil war there that plagued the country for over a decade. “It started when I was 7 years old and ended when I was in high school. When you are here, you don’t realize how lucky
PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN continued on 6a
“Something that
I think is really wonderful was the capacity of people welcoming me when I came here. I will never forget that and will be eternally grateful,” — Miguel Quinteros
Andrew Skinner • Oceana’s Herald-Journal
Miguel Quinteros recently shared his experience of becoming an American citizen on April 15, 2015.
Trailer fire claims Walkerville woman
Love on the water
A fire at single wide trailer just east of the Oceana County line in Newaygo County’s Lilley Township Wednesday, Jan. 25 claimed the life of 36 year old Mari Sue Conkle of Walkerville. According to Jerry Frick of the Walkerville Area Fire & Rescue his department was dispatched to assist the Lilley Township Fire Department around 10:30 a.m. for a trailer fire on 13 Mile Road. Despite being the closer department Walkerville was not the primary department for the fire since it occurred in Newaygo County Frick said late last week. According to Frick his department was the first on scene but only learned that Conkle was in the trailer after arriving at the fire. After extinguishing the fire,
FATAL FIRE continued on 6a
Prosecutor terminates assistant Search underway for successor
Andrew Skinner • Oceana’s Herald-Journal
A pair of swans come together to form a heart with their heads and necks Monday morning, Feb. 6 in the frigid partially frozen water of Pentwater Lake near Longbridge Road. Valentines Day will be celebrated around the world next Tuesday, Feb. 14. According to Hallmark (the largest manufacturer of greeting cards in the United States), 141 million Valentine’s Day cards (excluding packaged kids valentines for classroom exchanges) are exchanged annually, making Valentine’s Day the second-most popular greeting-card-giving occasion; and over 50 percent of all Valentine’s Day cards are purchased in the six days prior to the observance, making Valentine’s Day a procrastinator’s delight.
Walkerville’s Sweet to step down Board sets community forum to start search for new superintendent/principal
WALKERVILLE — With the pending departure of Walkerville School Superintendent/Principal Mike Sweet, the Walkerville Board of Education is taking the steps to seek out a successor. Sweet said he submitted his resignation to the board last October with June 30 to be his last day. Sweet said he is not retiring and at some point will have to return to work force after completing a large ambition. “I’m going to walk the Continental Divide Trail,” Sweet said. Once his employment ends, Sweet said he’ll leave for Montana and walk the trail
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to New Mexico. Sweet said he walked portions of the Appalachian Trail when he was in his 20s, and wants to take advantage of this opportunity while he’s still young and in good health. He does not plan on leaving the Walkerville area. In the meantime, Sweet will assist the board with the search for a new superintendent/principal where he can. Once candidates are developed, Sweet said he’d take a step back and let the board make a good
SWEET STEPS DOWN continued on 6a
Former deputy pleads to misdemeanor Former Oceana County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Wesley John Hanks pled to one of two misdemeanor charges filed against him last fall and the other charge was dismissed. Hanks, 52, of 216 Lincoln St., Hart, pled to the charge of malicious destruction of trees, shrubs, crops and grass and was sentenced to 93 days in jail to be served at the court’s discretion with credit given for time served. He was ordered to pay fines and costs of $400. A one year no contact order was issued. The second charge, police radio receivers/ scanners — use during the commission of a 93-day misdemeanor, was dismissed. Hanks’ employment with the sheriff’s office was terminated last September. The case was investigated by the Michigan State Police Special Investigation Services, Rockford Post. The case was assigned to Newaygo County Prosecutor Robert Springstead after Oceana County Prosecutor Joe Bizon has recused himself.
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Oceana County Assistant Prosecutor Jeffrey Kabot’s employment with the county was terminated by county Prosecutor Joe Bizon Jan. 26. Although he couldn’t elaborate, Bizon said some issues were brought to his attention that he and Kabot attempted to correct, but were unsuccessful, prompting Kabot’s release from employment. Bizon is currently conducting a search to seek out a new assistant prosecutor. He said the position vacancy has been posted in places where he’s received adequate applications in the past. He’s also using word-of-mouth to see if any local attorneys might have interest and has posted position with Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan at michiganprosecutor. org.
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ASSISTANT PROSECUTOR FIRED continued on 6a
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• February 9, 2017 • Oceana’s Herald-Journal
Proud to be an American
and how fortunate you are to be in a place that can seem so quiet and boring,” Quinteros said. “When I was growing up, you were not sure if you were going to be alive the next day. There was no other reality that we knew.” He explained that the Salvadoran Civil War was a proxy war of the Cold War, utilizing the Theory of Containment to stop Communism from spreading. The government of El Salvador called upon the United States for aid. “They said ‘we have communism here, please help,’ and it was (U.S.) foreign policy to stop communism everywhere,” Quinteros said. He continued on to recount the history of how the U.S. government funded El Salvador’s government with weapons, clothing, food and more for their military. “The guerillas started from the professors and students at colleges peacefully protesting, and the government started repressing them with violence. All we knew, even as children, was that the “Death Squad,” would come and torture and kill those that were caught in a protest or disagreed with the government in any way, shape or form.” “The civil war was called Communist, but it was poor, innocent people, and some that wanted to make human rights to be heard, that were being killed. On some occasions, there were massacres, where they killed everyone in a village from the children to the adults and the news would say, ‘we killed 10,000 communists today,’” Quinteros soberly recalled. “Some people in the United States knew what was going on, but there was no social media at that time, and some people in the U.S. protested. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. said ‘we are done’ and we ended the civil war.” “During that time, I was a child and I went to a school that was censored by the government, and we only knew what the government wanted us to know, and the government controlled the media, too. I grew up like that, and it wasn’t until my time at college that some professors taught us the history of the country that we did not know before. It was hard for me to find out that the U.S. had such an active part in the war. I never wanted to come here. I had people that invited me, but I refused to come,” Quinteros said. Then one fateful day, when he was 24 years old, changed his life forever and he needed to come to a land he never wanted to enter. Quinteros was riding his motorcycle and had a head-on collision with a pickup truck. His face bears the scars as a reminder of that day. The Catholic Diocese of Cleveland was doing mission work in El Salvador and Quinteros was a part of that work, and following his accident, they wanted to take him to a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. Quinteros said that he initially refused. “I refused until I was dying. I had a bad bone infection that was resisting antibiotics. I had a lot of national pride, and said ‘my doctors here will do just fine,’ but I was in really bad shape, so I finally said ‘yes.’ That’s when things started to move. There was a gentleman that worked at the U.S. Embassy that got me a visa, and one of the airlines, United Airlines, gave me a ticket. A few days later, I was flying to Ohio. One of the doctors from St. John West Shore Hospital in Westlake, Ohio flew to El Salvador and he flew back with me. There were signs of welcome and balloons and the local paper and local TV news were there when I landed. Then they took me to the hospital and the president of the hospital was waiting for me in the ER. All I knew was ‘welcome’ in English and ‘thank you’ were my second words.” Quinteros humorously recalled that since those were the only words of English he knew, he would become confused when people would say “You’re welcome” after he would say “Thank you,” so he would say “Thank you” again, thinking they were welcoming him again, and it became a very circular conversation! To his rescue, came a kind nurse from the Phillipines who wrote it out, showing Quinteros that when they said “You’re wel-
Andrew Skinner • Oceana’s Herald-Journal
Pentwater Public Schools teacher Miguel Quinteros assists seventh grade student Brandon Macher during his third hour computer class.
come” it was equal to “De nada.” “They were so gracious in Cleveland, the nurses and doctors. These people were so welcoming,” Quinteros said. “One day a retired doctor showed up to my room with books in English and pointed at the pictures to help me understand. After a while, he left and he came back the next day with the same books, and he kept coming back every day. He didn’t speak any Spanish, but I found out that the doctor that brought me to the hospital told the other doctors that he had a patient from El Salvador who did not speak English, and this doctor volunteered to teach me. I was there for two months, and I was communicating with nurses at the end of that time.” News coverage about Quinteros continued, and he said that after people read his story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer they would show up and ask if they could take him around the city. He said he was taken to restaurants, plays, museums, the orchestra, sporting events and more. He got to see the Cleveland Indians play and met their star shortstop, Omar Vizquel. “My historical memory of the U.S. was not good, but those people changed me and I saw people as individuals here,” Quinteros explained. “There is a big difference between the people here and foreign policy. The people here are very welcoming, with big hearts, and so many went out of their way to make me feel welcome.” After being in the hospital for two months, Quinteros said he spent an additional three months in the U.S. to continue the healing process from his extensive injuries. “I stayed with a priest and continued learning English and healing, and enjoying the generosity of the people of Cleveland. I never really thought there was such goodness in this country and such warm hearts, and to think that they didn’t even know me, but they welcomed me with open arms,” Quinteros recalled. “My doctor even opened his house to me and gave me a room, before the priest invited me to stay with him. After the three months, I had to go back to my job in El Salvador. My work was up in the mountains, and I drove a Toyota Land Cruiser with a stick shift. I had to push the clutch with my left leg, which was my injured leg, and I developed a stress fracture. I went to the hospital, and the X-ray looked so bad that it brought me down emotionally. I was back to the place I was before. Yet the next day I was flying back to Cleveland, they had called my doctor there and he said ‘don’t let the doctor there touch you.” Once Quinteros was back in Cleveland, he said that he received the news that if he wanted to save his leg, he had to stay in the U.S. for two years. “I had only packed and planned to stay for a month, I didn’t even say goodbye, because I figured I would be back soon,” Quinteros said. “During this time, one of my friends from
Cleveland, he was chaplain at Ashland University in Ohio, said to me, ‘you can take English classes here’ and he said he would pay for it. So, I passed my TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) test, and then I started taking regular college classes. I had to ask for immigration to extend my visa. I eventually ended up switching to a residency after going through the immigration process, then I got married and we have two sons.” Quinteros and his wife, Ana Julia; and their sons, Lucas and Michael; recently moved from Pentwater to Ludington, but the family has been active in this area for many years. Desiring to become a teacher, Quinteros said he chose to return to school, but was unable to get his college training from El Salvador to validate, and tried to do so for two years, but was ultimately unsuccessful. So he said he decided to start from scratch at Baker College in Muskegon and graduated with his teaching certificate in 2012, with his endorsements in Social Studies and Computer Programming. “My first job was teaching Spanish at the middle school in Ludington, but I didn’t have the endorsement to teach it, so I was hired as a long-term sub.” After that school year, Quinteros said that he thought he should get his Spanish endorsement and earned it shortly thereafter from Grand Valley State University. In the fall of 2013, he was hired to teach at Pentwater Public Schools, and spends his days teaching Social Studies, Spanish and computer classes to multiple grades. He said that he enjoys sharing portions of his story with his students, as he said that it “helps them to have a different viewpoint, and focus on some-
thing positive.” Quinteros is also very busy outside of school, with Boy Scouts, coaching varsity soccer at Pentwater and has sung in the choir at St. Gregory’s Catholic Church in Hart. He was the youth minister there, as well as at St. Vincent’s in Pentwater and St. Joseph’s in Weare for 10 years. “Right now, school takes up a lot of my time,” he said. “This is my second year coaching varsity soccer, and before my accident, I was a soccer player. I am glad to be back as a coach.” He added that coaching soccer reminds him of the physical limitations the accident left him with. He runs well and can exercise, but if he uses his bad leg on the soccer field, he can feel some pain. In order to get rid of the infection that he had so many years ago, he received a bone, musclet and skin grafts and he tries to be mindful of his limits. Another one of those limits comes in the form of a promise he made to his family, that he will never ride a motorcycle again. “I tell my children that you know how you are born, but you don’t know how you are going to end up. When I was a kid growing up in El Salvador, I saw some of the missionaries that came there that were speaking English. I never thought that I would be speaking English someday.” Quinteros also did not know that not only would he be speaking English, but he would also be applying for U.S. citizenship. “I became a citizen on Tax Day of 2015,” he said with pride, then reflected on the steps he took to get there. “It is expensive. You have to pay a fee to apply for citizenship. For the other processes, I had to hire a lawyer. First, they granted me a temporary residency
Sweet steps down
from Page 1a
decision. The board has hired the Michigan Association of School Boards to assist it in its search, and a community input session has been scheduled for Feb. 20 at 6 p.m. The open forum will be conducted by Dr. Rod Green, MASB consultant, and will be in the school cafeteria. Green will provide an overview of the search process and receive input from administrators, school staff and community members regarding the criteria to be used in evaluating candidates. People can go to the school website at www. walkk12.org and click on the link to complete the online survey. Sweet was hired as the superintendent/principal in June 2011.
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for two years. You have to go through extensive interviews, then I had to go through that again after two years, and it always came out okay, so then they granted me permanent residency, which was good for 10 years. Once my 10 years was getting close, I had to renew or become a citizen, so I just decided to become a citizen, then I won’t have to deal with immigration anymore!” “(With immigration) you have to go to Detroit for interviews, fingerprints, and it’s a long process. They basically go through every aspect of your life from paying taxes to criminal records, background checks, fingerprints, making sure you are here with the right intentions, and not planning on doing anything bad to the government. You have to do it all over again to become a citizen. There is a series of interviews, and when they say you are okay, they schedule a citizenship test. I was hoping I would pass U.S. History and the lady who interviewed me, said if you don’t pass this test I will tell your students! They have a series of 100 questions. I was asked only one, ‘who was the first president of the United States?’ I said ‘under the Constitution or under the Articles of Confederation?,’ and she said she didn’t know and asked how many there were under the Articles of Confederation, and I said that there were eight. She wrote that down and gave me the approval I needed.” Next, I had to go to the Grand
from Page 1a Rapids immigration court, where they do the swearing-in for a new citizen with a federal judge. They do a formal ceremony, and you say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the National Anthem, and then they welcome you into the country and give you a citizenship certificate. My children were there and were very proud. It was a very significant moment. I had been paying taxes, but could not vote, so that was a big part of it for me, citizenship participation,” he stated. Quinteros said that he got to vote for the first time in this past election cycle, in the primary and the election. “I tell my students to vote, because it is sad that people don’t want to participate in the life of this country. I took my children with me and told them that it is a privilege that not everybody has.” In class, he encourages his students to openly listen to those who disagree with them, and to be mindful of the world around them. He said that he shows Channel 1 news, which is produced for schools across the country, on Mondays and Fridays. He said that recently they did a segment on the 20 steps a refugee has to take before they can even enter this country. “I like to show my students how we can connect a historical event to something that is more relevant, and how the foundations of this country have led to what we are as a country. No events in history are separate from each other, there are always consequences and ramifications.” “When it comes to immigration, it is so complicated right now. I went to a lecture with an immigration lawyer, and she said she didn’t even understand it, as it is a very uncertain process. I am glad I went through it and do not have to go through it again,” Quinteros remarked. “I think that it is important as citizens of this country to remember that we are a nation of immigrants. Something that I think is really wonderful was the capacity of people welcoming me when I came here. I will never forget that and will be eternally grateful.”
Assistant prosecutor fired from Page 1a The application deadline is Feb. 17. Bizon hopes to fill the position shortly after that. Kabot was hired in August 2014. He succeeded Erin Fisher, who resigned to join a private law firm.
Fatal fire
which was contained to one end of the trailer, emergency personnel located Conkle at the opposite end of the structure, Frick said. Frick believed Conkle’s cause of death was smoke inhalation and that the fire started due to an electrical problem with a heater. Frick added that this was the first fatal fire his department has dealt with in a number of years. Adding that Walkerville firefighter Lance VanSickle has been on the department for 30 years and had never been involved in a fatal fire.
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