Jeretta Douglas, who has served on the Flowing Wells Governing Board since 1987 and will step down in January, isn’t much for waxing on about the past.
She’s excited about the future — her own, which will be spent volunteering at the elementary school her children attended, and the individual future of every child in the Flowing Wells Unified School District.
Come January, it will be the first time in more than 70 years that a Douglas hasn’t been on the Flowing Wells school board. Her father-in-law, Walter Douglas Jr., served for 44 years. The midtown neighborhood has evolved from an agricultural area to a suburban district. It’s now an urban district that serves many families living in poverty. The district has the Family Resource Center to assist families with needs outside school, including a clothing bank.
Jeretta Douglas has seen change. She’s not afraid of it. She embraces it as being as necessary as breathing.
“I’m amazed at the adaptability of these kids,” she says, sitting in the hair salon she owns next to her home on West Roger Road. “They’re ready to go and they need the tools to do it.
“Just think about the next 20 and 30 years and what these kids will do.”
Douglas’ kind of optimism is the lifeblood of education. It runs through the veins of Flowing Wells, pumped by people like Jeretta Douglas — residents who have plenty on their own plates, but for whom contributing to others is a given. She spent years involved with the PTA and volunteering as her kids went through school. She attended Governing Board meetings, just to know what was happening in the district.
In a way, Jeretta Douglas is Flowing Wells’ history. She’s lived in the area since her family moved here from Freedom, Indiana, when she was 12. Her father was an ironworker who came to help build the missile silos surrounding Tucson. The family lived in a house on Romero Road, when the Flowing Wells area had an airport, orchards and a racetrack. Over the years her siblings and parents moved back East, but Jeretta stayed. “The minute I saw those mountains, it was love at first sight.”
She and Walter Douglas III went to Flowing Wells High School together — he was class of 1960, she was class of 1961 — and started dating after graduation, marrying at age 24. “We were ‘older.’ In those days people were married at 19. We were already established at our jobs,” she said. When Jeretta was 19, she was opening her first hair salon.
But enough about the biography details. As we spoke in her salon last week, those sorts of what-where-when questions gave way to what Jeretta Douglas is all about — the future, and the helping hand Flowing Wells offers to each child, no matter what.
Many Flowing Wells families live with poverty. It’s a fact. So you deal with it, she says. Money isn’t allowed to be a barrier to a student’s participation and opportunity to explore their interests. Say a child is wants to play the trumpet in her elementary school band but the family can’t afford an instrument — it gets figured out, maybe through donations or penny-pinching elsewhere.
The schools and board have embraced technology, arts, music, elementary and middle school athletics for all kids. They’ve added an auto program, a fashion design program, an agriculture program. Everyone belongs. What kids need to face the world keeps changing. School in Flowing Wells must be a place where students know they are safe, loved, wanted — a place to learn.
“We must continue on and progress,” Douglas said. “We don’t want to be holding students back by not adapting.
“I really hate to hear people say ‘When I was in school …’ she said. “When I hear that, I say, ‘No one cares.’ It’s a different time. We’re doing things in a way that makes sense now. It’s not what you did 100 years ago.
“I love that our students have the freedom to explore,” she said. “We say to them, ‘We are happy for you. We’re happy with you.
“And to express that is a joyful thing.”
