A Sense of Dedication: Schoolteachers of San Juan County Jessie L. Embry
During the 1940s Zenos L. Black, the superintendent of schools in San Juan often found it difficult to hire teachers for the county schools. He recalls that one time he went to Cortez, Colorado, to try to talk a woman in returning to the classroom. She explained that her health would not permit her to teach again but she had a daughter who had just graduated from high school who would like to be a teacher. Black decided to hire the daughter and took her to an isolated community twelve miles from the highway. She taught the first part of the year and then returned home for the Christmas holidays. When she returned to open the school again, the road to the community was blocked with twelve or fourteen inches of snow. With the consent of her parents, the girl gathered all of her belongings together and hiked the twelve miles into the school. As a result of this hike, she developed pneumonia. When her parents found out about her illness, they took her to the hospital. While she was recovering, her mother taught at the school, Superintendent Black adds, "If you can beat that for dedication! I dare you to do it because you just can't."1 This story is not an isolated incident of the devotion that the teachers in San Juan County had to their profession before the uranium and oil booms. The men and women who came to the area to teach had to contend with isolated conditions, low salaries, few teaching materials, and inadequate 309
