Roscoe Caron
"The Latino immigrant story resonates for me," says Roscoe Caron, who
grew up among French Canadian immigrants in Manchester, New Hampshire.
"My grandparents were textile mill workers." Caron went to a Catholic
school through eighth grade, where half the day was taught in French
and half in English. He started college at Superior State University in
Wisconsin, then spent one year at Ohio State before moving to Eugene in
1972. "When I got here, I thought, 'OK, I'm home,'" he recalls. A year
later he joined the Hoedads Reforestation Cooperative. "We worked in
every state west of the Rockies, except Alaska," he says. "We grew to
over 300 workers in the late 70s. I became Hoedads president in
'82-'83, right when the Reagan Recession happened." Caron returned to
college at the UO to become a teacher and graduated in 1986. He taught
middle school in Junction City, then in Eugene's Jefferson, Kennedy,
and Kelly middle schools until he retired in 2010. In 1996, he and his
tequila-drinking and garage-band buddy Jim Garcia, then faculty advisor
to MEChA (the Latino student union) at the UO, launched Ganas, an
after-school program that brings MEChA members to middle school twice a
week to help Latino students with homework and to have some fun. "Ganas
has been going for 22 years," he notes. "It's been the incubator for a
lot of college students going into teaching." More recently, Caron has
invested his time and energy in CAPE (Community Alliance for Public
Education), a local advocacy group that challenges the prevailing
corporate model of standardized teaching and testing. "Oregon is now in
its second year of standardized testing for kindergartners," he says.
"We're promoting opt-out." Learn about CAPE meetings and events
on the CAPE Facebook page.
happening people
photograph and story by Paul Neevel
Eugene Weekly / 19 April 2018
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