Catholic middle school celebrates two decades in Brownsville

Guadalupe Regional Middle School is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its founding with a Birthday Bash Scholarship Gala on Saturday evening at the Rancho Viejo Convention Center.

The gala represents a transformation of the Mardi Gras event that Guadalupe Regional has held for many years as the chief fundraising vehicle to support the school and its students.

GRMS is Catholic, tuition-free college preparatory school for students from low-income families at 12th and Lincoln streets in Brownsville. Its simple and powerful goals are “College and Heaven,” and it bills itself as the only tuition-free Catholic school in Texas.

“We anticipate an evening of joy and excitement, filled with dinner, live music and dancing,” the invitation to donors reads. “It will be a wonderful evening to socialize with other community leaders and school donors who all share the mission of our school after so many months in the isolation of the pandemic. It will be a night honoring the transforming influence GRMS has had on so many families of Brownsville over the past 20 years.”

The Most Rev. Daniel E. Flores, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville, will be the special guest.

Earlier this week, former Brownsville Mayor Tony Martinez, who was the founding board president when GRMS welcomed its first class of students in 2002, recalled the school’s earliest days.

After abandoning an earlier organizational attempt, the founders regrouped and enlisted two local congregations: the Marist Brothers who run St. Joseph’s Academy, and the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament who run Incarnate Word Academy, “because they were local people, they’d been here for over 100 yrs both of them, and so they had a better idea of what it was like to be in this environment. … Then we got joined by the Edmund Rice Christian Brothers of North America,” Martinez said.

“My recollection is I went up to Chicago and what happened was everybody contributed one way or another, whether it was their time, their talent or their treasure, and we put it together and it got started in 2002.”

By the end of the second year, they were out of money. Realizing the Christian Brothers had the deeper pockets, Martinez “went up to Chicago to beg borrow or steal what I could, and they gave us $200,000. Remember it was 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. We were able to stay afloat for the third year, that’s what it was costing us even back then, so then we went on a capital campaign so we could build up an endowment — $600,000 to sustain 20 kids through three years — and as God would have it, things just got better and better and we were able to get a little credence, a little stability and people started believing in us,” he said.

“I think after that third year, when we saw that first class walk across the stage at the Immaculate Conception and get their diplomas from the bishop, something just said ‘yes we can,’ this is something that can be accomplished, and here we are 20 years later and a lot of wonderful people have crossed that threshold into St. Joe, some ended up at different schools South Texas Medical, it’s varied, but we were having a good success of putting out some pretty good kids.”

Martinez said in its first three years GRMS was able to establish a culture of rigorous instruction, discipline and faith formation.

“We had food pantries to help out the families. I can tell you that there were kids that I went to see at their houses that had no running water and no electricity, and how they made it through I don’t know, but they did and it was a miracle and we were able to stay alive and their brothers and sisters said I want to go where you went to school,” he said.

“Then, St. Joe’s started getting concerned how are these kids going to fit into this other type of environment … So we established a committee of parents to try and figure out how can we coalesce everybody together so there wouldn’t be this distinction of poverty versus wealth, and Lord and behold the second miracle happens and the boys with the fancy cars were asking the girls from Guadalupe to the prom and it just organically worked,” he said.

“The kids didn’t have that prejudice or bias, you know, and they enjoyed each other and where they came from didn’t seem to make a difference. It just worked, and through the grace of God it worked.

“Now, you’ve got a lot of kids now that are coming back, giving back to the school. I mean you’ve got lawyers, doctors. … I mean I think the bottom line is giving someone the opportunity to do something that they’re very capable of is rally the theme of the whole deal.”

Angela Smith was a member of that first class, coming to GRMS from Champion Elementary School. She is completing the second year of studies for her doctoral degree in special education leadership at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

From GRMS, Smith went on to St. Joseph Academy, completed her bachelor’s at the University of Texas at Brownsville in 2013 and her master’s at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in 2019.

The teachers at GRMS “made you want to learn,” she said. Smith has filled all roles at GRMS, from student to volunteer tutor to chaperone to the Marist Brothers summer camp in Esopus, N.Y. She is also a donor.