To shine a light on the transformative power of tuition assistance, Alumni Council member Ted Alcorn ’01 is telling the stories of alumni who were grateful recipients during their Academy years.
By Ted Alcorn ’01
When Chamiza Pacheco de Alas ’96 drops off her sixth-grader at the Academy, she sometimes thinks about arriving there herself at that age. The school’s campus is just across town from the working-class Sawmill neighborhood where she’d grown up, but they were a world apart.
Her family was frugal by necessity. Her dad, who had worked as a social worker before going back to school to study sociology, and her mom, who would later become an elementary school counselor, both prized education. But that’s not a field that will make you rich.
Her family never wanted for anything, Chamiza recalled, but there were few luxuries. They lived in a house her dad built himself. Family vacations were trips to Ghost Ranch, where her parents would teach in exchange for accommodations.
Still, Chamiza was privileged in other ways, with generational roots in the state and an extended family that “just poured love into me every single day.” Her parents expressed that love, in part, by seeking the best schooling possible for her, and through a family connection, her mom learned about the Academy’s generous financial assistance program. After Chamiza braved what was at the time a formal and intimidating application process and was accepted, the school offered to cover her tuition in full.
That didn’t make it any easier to step onto campus or bridge the gulf she sometimes felt with other students. The cues she was out of place could be minuscule, like a student poll that inquired, innocuously: Are your jeans Guess or Gap? “My jeans were from Kmart, or maybe from Thrift Town, and I don’t even know if I had heard of Guess before that moment in time,” she said. By eighth grade, she was floundering, and her parents thought briefly about transferring her out. But as she got more involved in theater and found a passion for community service, she regained her footing.
The Academy’s faculty fed her mind, as did her classmates and their families. “They came from really different backgrounds,” she said, and “pushed me outside of my shell.” One friend’s mom, an attorney for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission who had argued a case near the end of her pregnancy, set an example for her of what a full-time working woman could accomplish. “The Academy awakened a part of me that I think was always there, that was not shy and timid, and that felt like I could take up space in rooms,” Chamiza said. “It made me a leader.”
Every parent wants to shape a better world for their kids, and today, as director of New Mexico programs at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Chamiza is lucky enough to make that her job. Most children in the state don’t grow up with the advantages she had, but far from it being a problem of ‘bad parents’ making poor parenting decisions, she sees structural forces that make it difficult for families, and that communities and their elected officials can address. That’s why the Kellogg Foundation funds non-profit, tribal, and government projects to strengthen early childhood education, health, and employment, what Chamiza says are “the legs on the footstool that really help families thrive and succeed.”
Her childhood experience and her work both inform how she navigates as a parent, too. Watching her son’s experience at the Academy (and in her role as a trustee), she’s seen how the school has updated its admissions processes to be more child-centered and fun and fosters a more welcoming campus culture. For her part, she reminds her son to be mindful, so when he talks about family vacations or his Nike shoes, he’s not inadvertently excluding anyone. “We’re sending you to the Academy, in part because it pulls kids truly from all financial backgrounds, and that means you have to step it up and be sensitive to all of those things.”
