TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — If you step into the museum at Portable Practical Educational Preparation Inc., you’ll see a bright turquoise bus. The doors still open and it still has the same interior.
As John Arnold stepped into it, a rush of memories came back to him about when he first started PPEP 58 years ago.
“I found it in an old used bus lot in Phoenix,” Arnold said. “I decided to buy the bus, make a portable school, so now we’re Portable Practical Education.”
He still remembers driving the bus to teach migrant farmworkers in the Bracero program. It was a program that brought migrant farmworkers from Mexico to work in American fields.
“Every one of them going away with a vision of what can be done with very little,” Arnold said. “We cannot stop learning ever. There is always a need. Things are changing around us so quickly. So our form of education and technology that we’re using at our schools, I think is being able to balance out on some of that.”
Arnold used the bus as a makeshift school and drove it to labor camps in Sahuarita with Tucson Unified School District teachers and volunteers.
“Mainly was driven by the students, what things that they thought they would like to have, but the core was adult basic education and GED,” he commented on his early work.
Arnold and PPEP also built the students homes, saying they got much more than an education.
“And that’s evident all up and down through the valley, so our graduates came away with a lot more,” he said.
The museum at PPEP is also recognized by the Smithsonian and has a lot of memorabilia from around the world, including from Caesar Chavez, who Arnold worked with in the early days of PPEP. Arnold also took part in Chavez’s work, including boycotts.
“People that worked in that community for many years now say ‘sí se pudó’ because they were able to accomplish something because of him,” he said, using the past tense for the Spanish term for “yes we can”.
Now they have a charter school district, Arnold saying he established the first charter school in Southern Arizona. Over 6,500 students, he said, have graduated from their PPEP Tec High Schools, which span all across Arizona.
“The model here has spread to both west and east Africa down into Mexico, so this bus has been more of a model,” he said.
Looking at a large golden bust of Chavez at the museum and talking about the legacy Chavez and him leave behind, Arnold said some of it is being forgotten. That’s why he said it’s his role and the role of others in the community to not just educate students, but make sure they don’t forget the past.
“Unfortunately I think along the way we’ve forgotten a lot of these things,” he said. “But now we have to look back and regroup and go forward.”
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Andrew Christiansen is a reporter for KGUN 9. Before joining the team, Andrew reported in Corpus Christi, Texas for KRIS6 News, Action 10 News and guest reported in Spanish for Telemundo Corpus Christi. Share your story ideas with Andrew by emailing andrew.christiansen@kgun9.com or by connecting on Facebook, or Twitter.
