Pupils overcome odds of poverty
By Lynn Brezosky, Associated Press, 4/29/2002
The team from Brownsville, a city along the Mexican border that is overwhelmingly poor, placed second out of 150, trailing only Hunter College Elementary School, a New York City school for the gifted.
''Since then, we've been competing in the championship level,'' said Russell Harwood, a teacher.
After its introduction in Brownsville, a city that is 91 percent Hispanic, chess has begun to rival soccer in popularity among young people in the Rio Grande Valley.
Of Texas's 141 participants in this weekend's US Chess Federation tournament in Oregon, 120 are from the Valley. The tourney began last Friday.
''People always think chess belongs among the very elite, but that's not the case in Brownsville,'' said Juliet Garcia, president of the University of Texas at Brownsville, which this year offered its first chess scholarship.
''We're one of the poorest communities in the nation. At Morningside they were all on the free lunch program. We had everything against us. Except our kids kept winning at chess.''
Clubs have formed in schools of all levels throughout the Rio Grande Valley. After school and after dinner, the chess boards come out. Older siblings play the younger, cousins come by.
Local lore credits the craze to one group of rowdy sixth-graders at Brownsville's Russell Elementary in 1989.
A frazzled principal walked into the classroom of teacher J.J. Guajardo, prepared to scold the boys. She swallowed her lecture when she saw the troublemakers in the corner, engrossed in a game. One child had taught the others. She asked Guajardo to start a morning chess club.
Soon, when Guajardo would arrive at school in the morning, ''I'd see 15, 20 kids waiting for me,'' he said. ''They were all dressed and ready to go at 6:45, 7 in the morning.''
In 1993, Russell won its first state championship. It was the first of seven consecutive statewide titles.
Three years ago, Morningside's team was one of only two schools in the nation to make the top 10 in both the younger and older elementary school divisions. The other? Greenwich Country Day School, a prep school in the wealthy Connecticut community.
Garcia, who has a doctorate in linguistics, links the success to the effect of learning two languages on the development of the brain.
''A child who comes to school having learned Spanish and now comes to learn English already has a complicated brain structure - the brain is ready to take on another set of rules,'' she said.
Harwood, like other teachers, he said he is amazed by the academic strides made by pupils who play chess, particularly in math.
In chess, ''they have to evaluate countless possibilities and make the best choice,'' he said. ''That's pure problem-solving.''
This story ran on page A3 of the Boston Globe on 4/29/2002.
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2002 Globe Newspaper Company.