Women in March (IV of V)

It may be one of Charlotte Macaluso’s most disarming traits. The Pueblo educator is perfectly comfortable discussing a childhood that, very generously, could elicit sympathy. But Macaluso neither wants nor requires any. While raised with few creature comforts, including indoor plumbing, her parents made up for it in other ways.

“Poverty was an issue,” Macaluso said in a recent telephone conversation as she prepared to join staff for a trip to Denver and the state basketball finals. (Pueblo had two high schools in the 4A Final Four.) “We might have been financially poor, but not in family structure,” she said. Her parents, a steelworker father and stay-at-home mother, encouraged education and nourished Macaluso and her siblings with love, attention and respect for education.

“I enjoyed school,” said the Pueblo Superintendent of Schools. “I was a bookworm,” and regular customer, she said, of the bookmobile that made the rounds to her ‘Dogpatch,’ community. ‘Dogpatch,’ for those who may not catch the reference, was the mythical home to the long ago comic strip character ‘L’il Abner’ and his hill country friends and family. Today the community, with many of its residents still living modestly, has been rechristened Eastwood Heights. To the lifelong educator, it’s still the loving, nurturing community she knew as Dogpatch.

Becoming superintendent was never part of the plan for Macaluso. But education, as her parents stressed, was. After graduating from the University of Southern Colorado, now CSU-Pueblo, she was assigned to Spann Elementary School, coincidentally the same school where, as a first- grader, she was selected to read to the principal. It was an honor reserved for only the best readers. It was also an experience not altogether what a precocious and voracious reader expected.

“I sat on her lap,” Macaluso remembered. When she finished reading the story and closed her book, the compliment she anticipated for reading so well, fell somewhere beyond empty. “Not too shabby,” were the words she heard. “I thought, ‘that’s horrible!’ When I’m principal, I’m not going to say that…I’m going to tell kids ‘what a great job!’” Coincidentally, many years after being a student at Spann, and later a classroom teacher, she became its principal.

Returning to Spann, Macaluso crossed paths with a couple of her own long ago and impactful teachers, Mr. Alvarez and Miss Kirton. “It was the best experience ever,” she said, “to be able to acknowledge them and the positive impact they had on my life.” Alvarez and Kirton, she said, taught with love for their students and left her with “wonder- ful memories.”

As her career progressed, she found herself once again in the classroom of the same middle school, Risley, that she and her siblings had attended. While it was a positive experience for her as a student, the school’s academic standing had fallen dramatically over the years. Far from being on life-support, the school was, very generously, in poor health.

“Very early on when I first went to Risley, I felt that there needed to be an entire shift in culture and philosophy,” she said. “Students were not being afforded standard-based curriculum.” She likens her step into her old middle school, more like “an intervention.” “The first thing that needed to change was having high expectations for students,” expectations, she said, they weren’t being afforded.

Macaluso has held a number of other administrative positions in southern Colorado’s largest school district. She has also racked up a number of honors for her excellence in teaching and educational efforts. She was selected as District 60’s superintendent in 2017 and immediately began applying everything she learned in her roles as both classroom teacher and school principal.

Macaluso’s approach to education is a mixture of tough love, ‘get the job done,’ along with the same lessons stressed many years before by her parents. “They encouraged me by telling me that education was important,” she said. They set in place a road map enabling her “to navigate my way through.” She also got lucky having teachers who “advocated for me.”

Pueblo, as other cities, still struggles keeping all of its students in schools. But slowly, things are pointing in the right direction. The state’s latest figures show that Macaluso’s District 60 graduation rates of 82.6 percent exceed the state average. Dropout rates in Pueblo also bettered the state average. That’s good, said Macaluso, but not good enough nor anywhere near where she wants it to be.

“Kids drop out for a reason,” she said. “Access and opportunity,” Macaluso firmly believes, are vital to a successful educational experience. Her checklist for excellence is both simple and achievable. Kids, she knows from years of classroom experience, need all their needs met—academic, social and emotional. Beyond that, Macaluso said, “insti- tutional racism” needs to be identified, acknowledged and addressed. “I’m thankful that there are things that have brought it to the forefront.”

Risley, Macaluso’s long ago middle school, has recovered. And while still not ideally where she would like it to be, the school has found new life and the student experience has been restructured; failure is no longer an option. But resuscitating and saving one school is far from a full stop for the Pueblo educator. Whatever transformation her old middle school has experienced, Macaluso believes is also something that needs to be directed at all Pueblo schools. Each—even the best—can do better. All students walking into the classroom each day deserve the best education they can get, she said. For her, that is job one and as superin- tendent, she also wants it to be job one for her classroom teachers.

Women in March I of IV

There may be a lot of bad things you can say about high rents, but thankfully, it was Washington state’s high rents that brought Pueblo native Sarah Martinez back home to the city where she grew up. Coming home also helped launch the freshman city council woman’s political career. But more than that, it was the time away that told her that Pueblo was where she needed to be.

The 28-year-old Martinez, elected in November, is the youngest person ever to hold a council seat. It’s a job, she swears, she never imagined or expected to have. In high school, Martinez remembered, “I was the one who lacked confidence, the one in the corner all by myself.” But being the quiet one focusing on grades also helped her graduate in the top ten of her class. But, as they say, that was then.

Martinez got more than twenty-one thousand votes in the November election, winning by “the largest margin of vic- tory (of any council candidate).” Now in city government, she has big plans for the next four years. Foremost is charting a course that will both ensure responsible growth and, at the same time, make Pueblo a better place to live.

Besides her new job as Pueblo’s District 3 council mem- ber, Martinez also has a full-time job running the county health department’s Youth Substance Abuse program. The job targets one of the city’s and state’s growing public health issues. “Colorado is the highest in the nation for youth vaping usage,” she said. “We (Pueblo) are also the second highest county for youth marijuana use.” Coincidentally, her department is funded by money generated by the state’s marijuana sales tax.

In college, Martinez earned degrees in psychology and biomedical sciences. Her undergraduate degree is from CSU Fort Collins, her graduate degree from Western Washington State University. Both degrees, she said, are tailor made for her work at the health department. “I get the chance to hear from young people everyday on what their needs are…what would prevent them from using substances.”

Her other job, city councilwoman, she chuckled, “Is a bit like drinking out of a firehose.” Since being sworn into office Martinez has spent hours meeting with all the (city’s) depart- ment heads and the mayor’s office. She’s also gone over the city’s budget “with a fine-tooth comb.” “I’m hungry, excited and know the potential for Pueblo and where we’re going.”

Martinez council ‘to-do’ list is long, eclectic but more than that, she said, achievable. One high priority for her district is addressing an issue plaguing the entire country, and especially towns like Pueblo. Pueblo, she said, is a “child-care desert,” an issue that hampers more than young families. It stifles economic development. Martinez said working families shouldn’t “have to choose between a full-time job and staying home” to care for children. She sees a day when Pueblo has “as many childcare centers as possible.”

It doesn’t stop there. Like a lot of Colorado’s cities and towns, Pueblo’s roads, she said, could use some attention and the business community could use a little more help as it recovers from the pandemic. But as much as anything, the freshman councilwoman is adamant about making the city’s quality of life a high priority for both the city’s families and its young people.

Making Pueblo a more vibrant city would incentivize students at Pueblo Community College and CSU-Pueblo to stick around instead of taking their degrees and leaving the city. The answer to that, she said, begins with becoming a family friendly city.

When Martinez was growing up, she couldn’t wait to leave Pueblo for somewhere else. Fort Collins and Washington state gave her that opportunity. But after moving back, she saw a different place than the one she left. “I got more entrenched in the community,” she said. Walking from home to her, at first, part-time job at the health department “I would notice things about the neighborhood and could talk to people.” She said learning about the city from an adult perspective was an eye-opening experience. “There were so many things hap- pening in Pueblo that I didn’t know growing up.”

While Washington’s high rents and her student loans made Pueblo more and more attractive after graduate school, it was also knowing that there would also be safe harbor with the person she called her role model. That would be her mother, Luanne Martinez. Her mother was a single parent and, as long as she can remember, an inspiration. “She instilled in me giving back and leaving your world better than you found it.” Her mom also stressed the value of “being a good community member.” The lessons were cornerstones in her campaign.

But despite her relative youth—she’s only a decade out of high school—Martinez is already looking to use her forum as a launch pad to inspire those younger than her and especially Latinas.

Martinez credits a luncheon she attended as a high school sophomore and seeing former Colorado State Senator Angela Jiron as the keynote speaker. “It was the first time that I remember seeing a person looking literally just like me in a position of power.” She was mesmerized by the way Jiron worked the room at that country club luncheon. Jiron, she said, planted the seed. “When I was planning a run for office, I kept going back to that moment.”

With a sparkling new bully pulpit, Martinez wants to let Puebloans and the whole state know what a special place her town is. It’s something she, herself, is learning every day. As an example, she sites Lake Pueblo, a fifteen minute drive from home. “I literally never went,” she laughed. “The fact that we have a state park that’s accessible and afford- able is fantastic.” It’s just one more thing to share about her hometown.

Women in March

You hear it so often from expats who’ve made the metro area home but whose roots are firmly planted a hundred miles to the south. ‘There’s just something about Pueblo,’ they say. Many an expatriate Puebloan will also say, there’s just no place like it.

Once the industrial capital of Colorado with a steel mill that pumped out everything from rail to wire and employed as many as 15,000, Pueblo today continues to reinvent itself while steadfastly holding on to its special blue collar charm. Reinvention also doesn’t stop there, especially for one of the town’s natives who sees herself in a whole new role in just a matter of months. Her name is Kim Archuletta, and she wants to be Pueblo’s new county treasurer.

The ’Steel City,’ once the name many people used to describe the town, still relies on the mill for bolstering Pueblo’s economic foundation. But the city has evolved. It’s now more Goldilocks than heavy metal. “It’s small,” said Pueblo native and aspiring politician Archuletta, “but not too small.” It’s also a place where extended families aren’t too far extended. Her own family, parents, Mack and Peggy, brother, grandmother and two children all live there. A fifteen minute drive in any direction is all you need for an Archuletta family reunion. “We’re a very close-knit family.”

Archuletta has had an eclectic and circuitous career path. But for the moment, there’s something just down the road that she has her eyes set upon. And for a person with an appetite for new challenges and the energy to pursue them, it’s not a destination she ever imagined she’d be charting. But for those who know her, the next stop is one that should surprise no one. That stop is elected office, more specifically, becoming the county’s new treasurer.

Armed with a degree in business and finance, she’s been a banker, managed budgets for the school district, overseen its facilities and spent a few years in the canna- bis industry, an industry some might look askance at. But Archuletta makes no apologies nor excuses for what some might think about her time in the industry. It, after all, has been legal in Colorado since 2012 and is an important and growing component in the city’s and state’s economy.

Archuletta touts her time in the industry as invaluable. “I can honestly say that it was the best business experience that I could have ever received—and better than any college course could have taught me.” Cannabis, today, is quite liter- ally a growth industry in Pueblo.

Today Archuletta’s a deed preparer in the county trea- surer’s office, an office, coincidentally, she hopes to lead after November. Yes, she’s a candidate seeking to replace the person she reports to every day. “It’s nothing personal,” she said. “It really isn’t.” But she admits that it can be “a little awkward.” Still the neophyte candidate knows to sepa- rate her political goal from her daily duties. At work, it’s all business. Any campaigning is done on her lunch hours or off duty time. The interview for this story was conducted over the weekend.

Whether she wins the June 28th primary and moves on to November, said Archuletta, won’t change her motivation for entering the race. To her, it’s about equity and opportunity. “Everyday, when I get to the office, I walk down the hallway and there is a wall of all the elected officials,” she said. “Every single picture is a man. I take note of it and wonder why are there no females?”

The treasurer’s office is responsible for collecting taxes and dispersing the money that funds “rural fire, water, sanitation and schools,” Archuletta said. It’s also the agency that invests that money. She thinks her finance and private industry background give her the insight to grow Pueblo’s portfolio.

“During COVID,” she said, “interest rates were really low, and our rate of return reflected that. We’re now seeing an increase that will benefit our portfolio.” She believes she has “a good idea for how to use excess funds and make sure we’re taking advantage of short-term interest.”

Archuletta also envisions making the treasurer’s office more people friendly, including using technology that would allow customers to conduct business on-line or provide drive-through options instead of having to park and come into the building. COVID changed a lot of things, she said. The office, said Archuletta, should change to reflect the times. Adding a woman’s photograph to the wall of elected officials at the county courthouse, she said, would be a good a step in the right direction.

While Archuletta speaks with a full-throated confidence today, there was a moment in her late teens that might have derailed what has become a successful career. “I was terrified when I got pregnant,” she recalled. She was nineteen and early into college. “It was scary,” because still a teenager, the responsibility of being a mother, raising a child was infathomable. But with her parents at her side, along with the baby’s father, “we all did it.” The baby, Ashlee, is now 25, married and working as a probation officer.

Archuletta, a surname spelled with two ‘t’s’, is nothing if not confident whether she moves on to the general election in November or not. There are still plenty of things to keep her busy, not the least is being a mom. She still, after all, is raising a pre-teen. She also has a number of other civic obligations, one of which is chairing the board of the city’s retail and medical marijuana licensing authority. Her time in the cannabis industry, she said, was the perfect foundation for the job.