What Do You Do After the Company Leaves?

No one seems to know where the money will come from.
"If I have to beg at the legislature, I'll beg," says Superior schools superintendent Russell Hoffman, now in his third year on the job. "The last recourse is going back to the taxpayers, but I hate to ask them for a penny more."

Could Superior someday have to close its schools? "I don't even want to consider that possibility," says school board president (and newspaper editor) Yolanda Ewing, "but I suppose we have to talk about it. If you don't have a school, you don't have a community. That's it. This is too depressing to think about."

There's yet another problem: white flight. About forty high school students from Superior attend Ray High in Kearny, 22 miles away. Under state law, they can attend whatever high school they want, as long as that school's district will have them.

"Twenty percent of the kids in Superior are Anglo, but half of the students that go to school elsewhere are Anglo," says Hoffman. "That's white flight. Our teachers are good teachers, and I'm not just saying that. It's the tools we give them to work with that trouble us. Doggone it, there's an inequity. Better facilities have a direct bearing on better education."

Trying to get someone to look at his plight, Hoffman wrote last October to the federal Office of Civil Rights, complaining of a "pattern of segregation." The feds didn't write back. After Hoffman pestered them with a few calls, an official told him that maybe the Justice Department could help. Hoffman hasn't contacted Justice yet.

"What might have to happen isn't pleasant," he says. "Maybe if some parents in Superior think that their kids aren't getting equal educational opportunities or are somehow being discriminated against and sue the state, we might get some help. I don't believe in management by crisis or management by Band-Aid, but it's pretty desperate. Make that very desperate."

Superior native Buck McRae, a 1988 Ray High graduate, says he switched schools for good reason. "I'm white, but that had nothing to do with it," says McRae, who has been hanging around Superior mulling his future since he graduated last May. "I wanted to take ROTC, and I couldn't get that here. I'm going to try to make something out of my life, and it's not going to be here. Going to Ray was my first step out. I'll get out of here, yes, sir."

It galls Russ Hoffman each school day morning when the Ray district sends a bus to the outskirts of Superior. "I'm just waiting for that sucker to come inside our town limits," he says. "I don't know what I'll do."

MERCHANT JOHN MITCHELL settles into his easy chair, getting ready to take his afternoon nap. After more than seventy years in Superior, he's playing out the string. Sometimes, he dwells on the old days.

"Was a hell of a place at one time," he says. "Was."
Superior was booming in 1916 when Mitchell Tibshraeny moved to town. Tibshraeny changed his last name to Mitchell and opened a clothing store. His son John graduated from Superior High in 1927, attended the University of Arizona for a year, then worked as an underground miner in Superior for a decade. A decorated hero in World War II, John Mitchell returned home and, in 1948, opened his own shop, the one he now refuses to board up.

He resists moving to the Valley. "I won't do it," Mitchell says. "My wife sometimes tells me she wouldn't mind trying someplace new one of these days."

Virginia Mitchell, a popular town councilmember, continues to iron some shirts. "No comment," she says.

John Mitchell stares out his sliding-glass doors toward nearby Superior High School. "I tell these kids, these Mexican kids," he says, "to get their education and then get out of here. I know, maybe I shouldn't talk like that. But hell, I've been here since 1916, so I should know what's up. You have to face reality.