As a Durango 9-R School Board member, I’m not sure how I’m going to vote for the Miller Middle School rebuild. As of this writing, the recommendation hasn’t been presented to the school board yet. I understand that many people in the Riverview area don’t want it there, that the developers at Three Springs do want it there (but folks feel that is too close to Escalante Middle School) and that there are drawbacks with both of the Miller site options.

One of the drawbacks the Durango 9-R administration cited about scrapping the current Miller building and rebuilding on roughly the same footprint is that students may be housed in portable classrooms for several years. Trying to think over whether this is a significant detriment to student learning or not took me back to my experience teaching in the early 1980s in a portable while a middle school was being built at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico.

The Zuni Public School District was carved out of the much larger Gallup-McKinley County Schools in 1980. The effort to do that was led by Zuni native and Fort Lewis College alumnus Hayes Lewis, who designed the split from GMCS to make education relevant to the needs of the Zuni people as his master’s project at Harvard University.

When I showed up as a junior high math teacher at Zuni in 1981, the secondary school included seventh through 12th grades. Hayes asked a number of us to help plan to move the seventh and eighth grades from the high school and the sixth grades from the elementary schools to form a middle school centered around a recreation center that been closed for several years.

Zuni Middle School opened as a group of portables while the district worked to secure funding from the state of New Mexico. The only parts of the rec center building that were used were the gym, restrooms and a lobby housing temporary offices and the teachers’ lounge. The rest of us were in portables arranged in two rows with a central gravel walkway. During the February thaw in western New Mexico, the gravel sank and our campus got the nickname Zuni Muddle School. Most of the teachers wore boots to get around.

Construction started around the old rec center during my second year at ZMS and they brought in lots and lots of gravel to mitigate the mud for good.

I was very happy in my portable classroom. I had the high school wood shop teacher make a sign to name it after Emma Goldman (“If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution”) because my program and portable were federally funded and my 20-something self liked the irony of naming U.S. government property after an anarchist. With a computer (an Apple II+) and other fun math toys in the room, I created a secure learning environment.

I can’t say having the kids in portables was detrimental to their learning. Classrooms with their own access to the outdoors created a flexibility in use of the whole campus and surrounding environment for lessons or just giving the kiddos fresh air to learn in on a nice day. Teachers communicated in the lounge in the building or outside their portables.

While I was deeply involved in the organization of the middle school and planning for the permanent building, I transferred to one of the Zuni elementary schools a few months before construction was complete. It just wasn’t going to be my muddle school anymore.

I took my Emma Goldman sign with me.

Mick Souder is a member of the Durango 9-R School Board. A self-described “road geek,” he is fascinated by the U.S. Highway 160/U.S. Highway 550 interchange project.