Sonoma Stories: Preschoolers benefit as teachers reunite in Head Start classroom

Rosalba Ramos and Esther Lemus have switched places. Yet both remain right where young souls starting out with few privileges and many obstacles need them: in a Head Start classroom at a southwest Santa Rosa school.

Long ago, Lemus, who’s now 71, was a Head Start teacher and Ramos, now 64, volunteered as one of her classroom helpers.

Today, former volunteer Ramos directs the Head Start program that serves more than 30 low-income preschoolers and their parents at R.L. Stevens School, off Stony Point Road. And retiree Lemus comes into her classroom once a week to volunteer.

They were seated feet apart in Head Start’s small office recently when Ramos recalled the first time she heard Lemus sing with 3- and 4-year-old Head Start students - in 1985.

“It was ‘Five Little Monkeys,’?” she said. “You still do it!”

The two women share not just a classroom and a profession but a love of children and a decadeslong reverence for the mission and work of the federal Head Start program. The child development and parenting initiative was created in 1964 as a cornerstone of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

“I owe Head Start,” said current volunteer Lemus said. “That’s why I’m back here. The work they do is so essential.”

Lemus’ five daughters grew up on Moorland Avenue southwest of Santa Rosa and attended Head Start as preschoolers. Today they all thrive.

The daughter who shares the name Esther Lemus is a Sonoma County deputy district attorney, a trustee of the Windsor Unified School District and an organizer, along with sister Sylvia Lemus, of the Cinco de Mayo celebration in Roseland.

Sylvia works for the county Human Resources Department and serves on the Community & Local Law Enforcement Task Force.

Elizabeth Lemus Meza is a registered nurse with Sutter Health. Rachel Lemus Valenzuela directs the student services department of the Mark West Union School District. And Letty Lemus Rodriguez is a child-support officer.

Their positive experience in Head Start, which works to prepare preschoolers for kindergarten and foster their social, emotional, cognitive and physical development, spurred their mother to study early child development and become, in 1975, a Head Start teacher.

Lemus worked at the Wright Head Start center that operated at the time in a church building at Todd and Stony Point roads.

As a teacher, she said, she preached what she had learned as a Head Start parent. She encouraged the preschoolers’ folks to be mindful that they were their children’s first teachers.

In 1985, an upgrading of the building serving Head Start families in the Wright Elementary School District caused Lemus to move her class temporarily to the Head Start classroom at Martin Luther King Jr. Park in Santa Rosa’s South Park neighborhood.

That’s where an elementary schoolteacher and mother named Rosalba Ramos lived with her family. Ramos was taking time off from teaching following the birth of the second of her three children.

She recalls the idea that came to her as she walked with her baby past the Head Start preschool in South Park.

“I thought, maybe I can volunteer there,” Ramos said.

She stepped in and asked teacher Lemus if she could use some help. Glad to have you, Lemus replied.

Right away, Ramos, who’d taught at grade schools in Salinas and at Santa Rosa’s Burbank and Lincoln schools, developed an affection for the 3- and 4-year-old preschoolers in Lemus’ class.

“I really fell in love with that group,” she said. “I said, ‘This is for me.’?”

Ramos enrolled in early development classes at Santa Rosa Junior College, then applied for work with Head Start. She was hired and for a time worked making home visits to Head Start families.

Having found her new life’s work, she rose to center director of the Head Start program at the Wright district’s R.L. Stevens school.

That Head Start location is one of 14 in Sonoma County serving some 413 preschoolers and their families operated through federal grants by the nonprofit Community Action Partnership.

Esther Lemus, who changed careers following decades of teaching and retired from Sonoma County’s Women-Infants-Children supplemental nutrition program, just last fall contacted Head Start and offered to volunteer.

“I need to give back to the program that gave me so much,” she said. It was a major bonus to learn that her former classroom helper Ramos is still teaching Head Start.

More than 35 years after Ramos offered to volunteer in Lemus’ classroom, Lemus returned the favor.

It thrills Ramos to have Lemus working with her and her students.

“She brings a lot of ideas,” Ramos said.

“It’s just nice to see her here. Believe me, we use her to the max.”

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.

Editor’s note: This version of the story corrects the spelling of Letty Lemus Rodriguez’s name.