Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 59

ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL Sunday, May 26, 1991 F3 eed High's 11 0 Days ii I in i in i inr i- School ome to Clo Tickets Woman Says In Arrest Suit THE ASSOCIATED PRESS LAS CRUCES A woman is suing for false arrest and imprisonment, alleging she was humiliated when police handcuffed her in front of her daughter over parking tickets she already paid. Sophia Martinez of Las Cruces seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages in the lawsuit filed last week in state District Court, naming the city of Las Cruces and Dona Ana County as defendants. Martinez says she got a New Mexico State University parking ticket in August 1989 and mailed, payment to Municipal Court, then received a second ticket Wi weeks later and mailed another payment A week later she says she received a summons to appear in Municipal Court for non-payment of both tickets. She contends Municipal Court Administrator Alyce Bales verbally confirmed receipt of payment on the first parking ticket! and told Martinez to bring in her; canceled check for the second ticket when she got it 1 When she received a second summons a month later, Martinez she contacted Bales again and was told to disregard the summons and that the order erasing the summons would be signed by a judge. The lawsuit says two months later' a police officer went to her home; with an arrest warrant, and she was taken away "crying and in hysterics to headquarters." Martinez says she was made the butt of police officers' jokes and the victim of excessive force at the hands of both police and of a jailer.

During the booking process, the lawsuit says, "the jailer was verbal ly abusive to (her) and, in directing her where to stand or where to sit, used excessive force in physically pushing and jostling her." Also, Martinez alleges that an officer said: "Any woman with handcuffs can't be a very good woman" and that other officers laughed and joked about her mimJ LZTZT' RICHARD PIPES JOURNAL saying goodbye to its last batch lifelong resident of the Sacramento Mountains and mother of four Weed High School graduates. "Because they have Holloman Air Force Base down there, a lot of their kids are transients," she says, "while some of the kids up here are fourth and fifth generation. Cloudcroft Superintendent Asbill says the school expects 15 students from Weed. "I hope they're not apprehensive about coming over here," he says. "It could be that it's the adults who have a problem." He says Cloudcroft never entertained thoughts of taking over Weed Alamogordo made the first overtures and probably couldn't do so.

"If Alamogordo can't afford to operate the school," he says, "I guarantee you Cloudcroft can't" Stockton says he's aware of the consequences of the closure. "Any time you close a school," he says, "it's going to ruin a Photographs of past graduating classes line a hallway in Weed High School. After 106 years, not mountain kids. They wear these big baggy pants and shirts that look like a blouse; they come from wealthy families and they're just not the same kind of kids." "You watch that road coming up the hill from Alamogordo every afternoon at quitting time," says industrial arts teacher Duane Barker, "and all you see are Mercedes and BMWs. "I call Cloudcroft a yuppie town; it's not, but that's still what I call it.

The thing that bothers me the most is the misunderstanding between the community of Weed and the school administration in Alamogordo. There is real friction over the closing of the high school and it has grown to the point of bitterness." Junior Trey Lewis plans to attend Artesia High School next year. "Cloudcroft is all preppy," he says. "I think I can play basketball down in Artesia, even if it is triple Near the bottom of the animosities list is the girls' basketball season of 1977. They still talk about it at school, and at the Weed Grill.

Weed had a strong team that year. English teacher Fred Gage, who has been at the school 20 years, says the girls beat. Cloudcroft five times during the season. At the district tournament, in the championship game, Weed and Cloudcroft squared off. It went into overtime, double overtime, triple overtime.

Finally, Cloudcroft won. Nobody remembers the score, but they certainly remember the sting. The best Weed has done and it's no small feat is second place in the Class A state championship. Doreen Teel, a teachers' aide, has for 12 years driven one of the two school buses that service Weed. She is not looking forward to next winter, when she'll have to drive up and down Denny Hill every school day.

It will be the first time a school bus route has been on the hill. Rural students going to Cloudcroft will have to take a bus to Weed, transfer to another for the trip to the bottom of Denny Hill and a third for the trip to Cloudcroft. "That highway gets black ice, and all it takes is one mistake," Teel says. "There'll be lots of times I just won't do it. I won't jeopardize the lives of a busload of kids just to get them to schooL" There are many other problems.

Weed elementary and Cloudcroft high school, being in different districts, will have different schedules, different vacation times. Anyone who has students in both schools, some parents say, will spend a lot of time trying to juggle schedules. Any Weed boy who wants to play basketball in Cloudcroft will encounter major difficulties because there'll be no way to get home after practice in the evenings. Some students might miss connections, Weed residents warn, and end up standing out in the snow. That's one reason they consider it DESIGNS NATIONALLY KNOWN DESIGNER OF SOUTHWESTERN, CONTEMPORARY AND COUNTRY SELLING C0AST-TO-C0AST SHOWROOMS: NEW YORK CONNECTICUT CALIFORNIA 'NEVADA FLORIDA -MARYLAND IN BUSINESS FOR 26 YEARS ALBUQUERQUE 889 I ELECTROLUX MEMORIAL WEEKEND CLEARANCE 2 DAYS ONLY SUNDAY, MAY 26 MONDAY, MAY 27 Sun 11-8, Man sUnllo BRING THIS COUPON TO 1809 SAN PEDRO Nb or CONTINUED FROM PAGE F1 were about $247,000, while revenue amounted to about $147,000.

Ed Cole, Alamogordo's associate superintendent for business and finance, says the picture wouldn't have been any better next year. Weed residents don't believe the bookkeeping, "but no one up here has the money to hire a high-powered lawyer to fight it." The coffee drinkers take solace in the fact that elementary classes in Weed will remain open next school year. It's a good thing, too, they say. A daily trip through the mountains to another school is "too far and too dangerous for the little kids." What a difference Denny Hill makes. 't A forested ridge in' the high Sacramento Mountains, the hill separates Weed from Cloudcroft.

Cloudcroft is 22 miles away on a twisted, two-lane highway. On each side of Denny Hill, the road to the top with its never-ending, double yellow stripe is about a mile and a half long. Cloudcroft has more than 600 residents. It caters to the tourist trade and the summer resort crowd. named for merchant W.H.

Weed in the 1880s, has a school that is ranked among the most isolated in the nation. When Alamogordo decided April 15 to close Weed High School, it "sought to send the displaced students to Cloudcroft, an independent, separate school district. Cloudcroft school administrators say they have tried to keep a low profile and not appear as campaigners for the demise of Weed High School. Still, when Alamogordo pushed the idea, Cloudcroft accepted the plan. Not so the students in Weed.

Several, say they will move to another town or endure a longer bus ride to Artesia before they will attend a single class in Cloudcroft. Dark resentment against Cloudcroft runs deeply in Weed, and it goes beyond anything as clear-cut as the long-time rivalry between two Class A basketball teams. "The people up here are cowboys," says Weed senior Daniel Waldon. "The people in Cloudcroft are preppies." Waldon, hardly an hour past his last high school exam, is perched with two of his seven senior classmates on a counter in an all-purpose room at the school. The door is open and the Pepsi man's truck is parked outside.

Like other residents around Otero County, the delivery man is surprised to hear they're closing down the high school. Weed residents aren't afraid to tell anyone about it and are often disarmingly plain-spoken. "We hate them (Cloudcroft) and they hate us," says graduating senior Jim Ward. "If I had it to do over again, I'd go to school in Weed. But never in Cloudcroft.

I'd go to Artesia before I would go to Cloudcroft." "Anybody can fit in here," Waldon says. "Somebody new comes to school, we accept 'em, make 'em part of us. It won't be that way in Cloudcroft." Classmate Stephanie Thomas says "kids who visited other schools said they got a warmer reception in Artesia. People in Cloudcroft weren't mean to them, but they just didn't feel at home." For its part, Cloudcroft is trying to ignore action taken by its school board in 1958, when Weed was operated by the old Otero County Board of Education. Under orders to consolidate, Weed chose then to join Alamogordo instead of Cloudcroft, believing Alamogordo would be more sympathetic if enrollment declined.

Cloudcroft was incensed at being rejected so much so that the school board called a special meeting. Say the records from that 1958 session: "Mr. Bounds moved that it be recorded in the minutes that it is the feeling of this board that if Weed and Pinon, of their own desire, go with Alamogordo at the present time and later wish to send their pupils to Cloudcroft Schools, that the Cloudcroft Schools do not accept them even if tuition is offered." The motion passed. Cloudcroft Superintendent Vernon Asbill today says he doesn't know that it was ever rescinded. As it is, Alamogordo won't be paying tuition; Cloudcroft will simply receive that much more state support based on the increased enrollment.

1 At the Weed Grill, owner Larry King stepfather of this year's valedictorian, Vanessa Clifton says the students in Cloudcroft "live in the mountains but they're Call Collect uqi iiaiiuii mi I II? ftt too dangerous for little kids. Teel says everyone will have to get up earlier and get home later next winter. "This change," she says, "is going to affect everybody." The consolidation ax grazed the neck of Weed High School last year. Trying to trim expenses, principal Basil Curry says, the school saved itself by cutting two teachers, shutting off the heat in the old gymnasium (sole escapee of the forest fire) and vacating two classrooms. Charles Stockton, superintendent of Alamogordo schools, says it didn't save enough money.

On April 15, the school board voted 4-0 to close Weed High School beginning next fall Curry has had health problems this year. His right arm is encased in a plastic cast and an intravenous tube protrudes from his left. "You'll recognize me right off," he tells a caller. "I'm the guy who looks like he's been in a wreck." In truth, he slipped and fell on his arm in the gymnasium. What was at first a minor injury suddenly became inflamed.

He says he underwent surgery, the infection got in his bone, and he has been struggling against it ever since. He says treatment has kept him from being at the school full time. "He hasn't been here enough to know whether this school is any good or not," says senior Marco Mejia, who questions the commitment if not the abilities of at least two teachers. "Personally, if I had kids I wouldn't send them Makers of Hand Made Indian Jewelry OLD TOWN by Hj 3784 DENTURE CARE Dentures as low as $225.00 per plate (certain restrictions apply) Partials Lab-Relines -1 day service Repairs same day service Softliners IX Montgomery fiHOP NEW PATIENTS WELCOME Si A 4 CENTER 2 I C.S.I.D.I. ff rj 3601 SAN MATEu i I Mil the school is of seniors.

here." The five teachers affected by the closure have all been offered jobs in Alamogordo, Stockton said. Some have not decided if they'll accept. Without exception, townspeople say the school has turned out graduates who can compete with anyone. "We don't have drugs, we don't have gangs, we don't have problems other places have," says postmaster Shirley Stone, herself a graduate who now has a grandchild in the elementary school. "People get a good education here.

They have gone on and become doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, teachers some of them run their own businesses." Despite all the bad feelings toward Cloudcroft, there are a few people in Weed who think it would be a good idea if Cloudcroft took over the system and allowed Weed to keep its schooL "Alamogordo can't relate to our problems," says Frances Goss, a CONTRACTORS EXAM PREP "Our Grads Are Going Places!" DO YOU NEED A NEW MEXICO CONTRACTORS LICENSE? GENERAL (GB2 GB98) SPECIALITY (GB-EE-MM CLASS) ELECTRICAL (EE 98) PLUMBING (MM 1) MECHANICAL (MM 2-3-4) JOURNEYMAN PREPARATION BUSINESS LAW (In Lieu of State Exam) 268-2000 111 Wyoming N.E. 1-800-274-5627 NMUSA Classes in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Farmington, Roswell, and Las Cruces 2 What Do You Suggest To Somone Who Shouldn't Live Alone? Many of you worry about an olderly relative or fritnd who lives alone. The problem seems to be how can our loved ones retain their independance and still receive the assistance they need in a secure environment. The solution is CAMLU RETIREMENT APARTMENTS. Camlu offers the advantage of an independent apartment setting with the security of a 24-hour staff and the comfort of full services.

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