Most students travel internationally every day
It’s 7 a.m. and high school senior Miguel Borquez is just a few blocks from school. He can see the campus but it could be half an hour before he’s in class.
Using his F1 student visa granted by the United States government, Borquez leaves his home on the Mexican side and crosses the international border into the U.S. to attend Calexico Mission School, a 400-student elementary and secondary school operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church since 1937.
Some things have changed in the school’s 70-year history—there’s a new air-conditioned gymnasium for kids to play indoors on days that usually reach 101 degrees Fahrenheit in September. And what was once a chain-link fence on the international boundary across the street from the school has been replaced with 15-foot-tall iron bars.
But much at the school has remained the same. About 90 percent of students are not Seventh-day Adventists. Nearly that many live in Mexico and must get up early enough to walk through the port of customs a few city blocks from the school.
Two years ago lines backed up as immigration debates flared in the media, leaving some kids waiting up to two hours to pass through customs.
“They had to wake up at 4 a.m. to get ready,” says school development director Theresa Diaz. “We’re talking kindergarteners who are five years old. That was hard on our kids.”
Since then, after community lobbying from Calexico’s chamber of commerce, border crossing agents created an express line for student pedestrians. By coming between 7 and 8 a.m. they can now clear customs in about 10 minutes.
The school serves as an option for parents who want their children to learn English and receive instruction from an international mix of teachers.
“You can see it from Mexico,” says 2001 graduate Harumi Nomoto, who now serves as assistant women’s dean at Adventist-owned La Sierra University in Riverside, California.
About 30 percent of the students receive financial aid from the Adventist Church and private donors. Many parents say the school has a great reputation across the border.
“Oh, it’s well known,” says Bernardo Samano, now principal of Valley Grande Adventist Academy in Weslaco, Texas. In the 1970s his father, an employee of the Mexican government, asked his border guard friends to recommend a school where his son could learn English.
Samano had a Catholic background and immediately had questions about the obvious difference that soon arose at school—mainly the day of worship and the state of the dead. He joined the Adventist Church two months later by baptism. Later his family and 34 of his relatives became Adventists, he adds.
“People would jump over the fence to attend our social events,” Samano recalls of his two years at the school beginning in 1974. Sometimes people would climb in trees to hide from border guards, he remembers.
Many former students who returned to Calexico Mission School for the 70th anniversary celebration in March said they are impressed with the new facilities. The school relocated twice in its 70-year history, all within a few blocks, says Dan Robles, a retired Adventist minister living in West Covina, California. He attended the school beginning in 1938 when it was a one-room school in the back of an old Studebaker car dealership converted into a church.
Crossing the border into Calexico, a town of 7,000 people then (now 38,000), wasn’t as big of a deal, Robles says. “During World War II there were border officers. But most of them knew who you were because it was a close-knit community.”
Many former students have joined the church long after graduation. Diaz says that’s the reason the school has existed for 70 years.
“They might leave here not having made a decision for Christ,” Diaz says. “But we know that five or 10 years down the road they’ll realize they met Him here.”