TUCSON, Ariz. — Civano Community School, recently named the “Greenest Grade School in America” by the makers of All Small and Mighty laundry detergent, would not exist had founder and lead teacher Pam Bateman not moved to the desert from Oregon about a decade ago.

Bateman moved to Tucson from Oregon, where she had helped to start another school, Amity Creek Magnet School in Bend, Ore., also teaching there.

When she moved to Tucson, she said she started looking around for “something familiar” and, after looking at a variety of schools, discovered that nobody was hiring.

“I never meant to (start another school),” Bateman said, joking that if she had any sense, she would have just gotten a job at Starbucks.

She said she got to know a developer in town who said he would build her a school if she would get it started, so she did.

She got chartered through the
Vail School District, an unusual move for a public school district, and set up shop in a classroom at
Mesquite Elementary School for the first year.

“Instead of fighting us, which a lot of districts are unhappy with charter schools coming in because it feels like they’re taking away there money and their students, but (Vail School District Superintendent) Calvin Baker decided instead of fighting it, he would sort of embrace it,” Bateman said of the chartering process. “He gets to kind of keep us under his wing and we get the support of the school district in a variety of ways.”

Later, the developer left the project.

Said Bateman: “As his parting gesture, he said, ‘Well, I’m not going to build you a school, but I did get you this model home.’”

It was a model home that was left over from the beginning development of the Civano neighborhood and it just happened to be empty, she said. The school ended up renting that home for more than three years.

The school started with about 35 kids and ended up with 55 during those three years, she said. Once a building plan had been started up again, the school had begun to take on more children, anticipating the completion of the project.

“Well, you know how things go with building, so it got kind of behind schedule,” she said. “So for that whole year, we ended up walking over to a neighbor’s house a couple blocks away who rented us her living room and a little library area that we rented every day for language.

“It was so much fun,” she added.

The kids who were there who are still around today will tell her that they miss going over to “Garrison Hall,” named for the home’s owner.

Bateman, who lives in the Civano neighborhood and frequently bikes or walks to the school, brought much of what makes Civano tick from the school in Oregon.

Connie Erickson, principal of Civano Community School, said she met Bateman at Mesquite Elementary, where Erickson was the principal.

“I can remember for two years prior to the school opening, she would attend Vail Governing Board meetings,” Erickson said. “Chartering a school is difficult.”

Vail School District is planning more green schools, she said, adding, “That is one of the priorities — to make it as green as we can.”

Bateman hopes that her passion for community schooling catches on.

“I sort of envisioned at one point that we’d get popular enough that others would want to start up their own little neighborhood schools,” Bateman said. “It’s cool and a lot of work.”

Bateman is proud of how far her school has gone and is already planning for future improvements.

The money from the contest, $50,000, will be going toward the building of a community room and commercial kitchen.

Bateman envisions the community room as one where they can serve the kids their hot meals, where they can do their morning announcements and even as a place the larger community can use for events and functions. The commercial kitchen will be used to prepare healthy meals for the children, using vegetables from the school garden.

Bateman’s whole family has been involved with the school.

Her husband painted the classrooms and was “very, very supportive” of the whole thing. Her daughter, Alli, who is now in high school, attended Civano and enjoyed helping out to make her school better.

“They’ve been very, totally terrific all these years, and it’s been pretty cool,” she said. “It was just really fun having Alli here all these years.

“When I said I was not going to teach in the classroom next year, (Alli) was all sad because she said, ‘It just won’t be the same without you.’”

One of the things on Bateman’s to-do list is to get in touch with all the kids who have now gone on to high school and college and see how they are doing, and she is confident that what they learned at Civano will stay with them.

“(The kids) leave here pretty good, solid, sustainable people,” she said. “We work a lot on a lot of things here for the five years that we have them. Some of them go on to the Civano Middle School, which is another three years and then by the time they’re out, they’re pretty environmentally friendly.”



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