Lisa Barry was only 7 years old when she prepared lessons to teach her first class ever.
She transformed her San Antonio garage, and at other times her bedroom, into a classroom for neighborhood friends — complete with handouts she took when school let out for the summer.
“I had a younger sister, and I felt like I needed to teach her everything I already knew,” Barry said recently in her classroom at Woodridge Elementary School in the Alamo Heights Independent School District. “So I started very young, but I loved teaching.”
Decades later, her current classroom is much more elaborate than the one she crafted as a child, with bright colors and plush benches arranged in cozy half-circles in the front of the room, and dozens of desks adorned with student’s water bottles, iPads and books.
Tucked into the back of each iPad is a black and white picture of a smiling child, not unlike the fifth-graders she teaches for two hours every day. Each photo is of a child who lived through or died in the Holocaust.
Barry worked alongside a trio of Holocaust survivors and state Sen. José Menéndez to pass legislation in 2019 to codify Holocaust Remembrance Week into the state curriculum, a cause which she happened across early in her teaching career and that has led to unlikely friendships with survivors and enduring lessons for hundreds of students over the years.
This session, she is working on another bill that would require the Texas Education Agency to review the implementation of Holocaust Remembrance Week.
The process has been a learning tool for students as they follow along as the bill progresses through committees and votes.
The Holocaust was a genocide that occurred during World War II, in which approximately 6 million Jewish people were killed by Nazi Germany. Other groups, including people with disabilities and homosexuals, among others, also were targeted. The tragedy is widely considered to be one of the most horrific events in human history and has long been a part of required curricula as a reminder of the dangers of intolerance and hatred. However, many adults lack knowledge of the details surrounding the dark period in history, according to recent surveys.
In Barry’s class, Abigail Cowart and Ziyanna Inniss are reading about Inge Auerbacher, a Holocaust survivor who wrote several books about her experience and went on to become a chemist after spending years in the Dachau concentration camp.
“She was one of the survivors, and she did a lot of stuff after to tell their story,” Cowart said. “She had a very hard time in the Holocaust.”
Barry, who teaches reading, language arts and history, said the Holocaust curriculum teaches students lessons about empathy, history and inclusion.
But the exercise also teaches students the insidious danger of singling people out and being cruel, she said.
“It just came to me in an urgent issue in my classroom back in 2002 and 2003 and I had a bunch of kids just kind of singling out another kid in my classroom, and it just kept going on and on,” she said. “And the kid was miserable.”
Witnessing the bullying pained the educator, who had a flashback to a classmate who faced a similar fate and later took his own life.
“I kept thinking, why didn’t I say something?” she said. “And I realized, you don’t say anything because you’re also scared. You don’t want the target to be you. So I thought, how can I make up a lesson that would teach them … what makes people attack that one person?”
Through the counselors on campus, she discovered the harrowing stories of the most innocent among the millions Holocaust victims, the children. Before that, Barry had little knowledge of the Holocaust. In the first years, she learned along with her students, stunned at the steady rise of evil, and those that stood by as it happened.
“We would all be sitting there the first few years … like, I wonder what those people could have done at that time,’” she said. “And they’re all ‘It reminds me of what happened the other day on the playground, you know, this bigger group of kids attacks this smaller group of kids, and they do it because they can.”
She then worked with the students to explore how they could be “upstanders” in situations of injustice instead of being bystanders and allowing bad things to happen.
“What can we do? What can we do to resolve that?,” she said. “To help those students in need and then also to figure out how to help those students who are victimizing others because being a perpetrator is also a cry out for help.”
Barry is connected on social media with the family of the boy who was singled out all those years ago.
“I’ve often wanted to kind of reach out to them and ask them if they were even aware that his need inspired something that may help someone else,” she said.
Gerrie Spellmann, the principal of Woodridge Elementary, said that the lessons Barry has taught are echoed throughout classes across the campus.
“She has done amazing work and helped facilitate tolerance,” she said.
The lessons in the classroom are also translating into actions by the students.
“I’ve started to include a lot more people into recess and sitting together at lunch and stuff,” Cowart said.
Barry’s work was recognized at the statewide level Sunday with an H-E-B Excellence in Education lifetime achievement award, which recognizes educators who have had far-reaching impact throughout their careers. The award comes with a $25,000 cash prize and another $25,000 for the school.
Spellmann said that the success of Barry as evidenced by the passing legislation and the H-E-B award are a lesson for students as well.
“Through the process of being a continuous learner, we talk about what that work can look like and the power that it can have,” she said. “We’re able to show by example that if you elevate that voice of what we believe, things can change.”
As students come to the end of their projects, and learn more about the lives of the children, Barry regularly invites one of the Holocaust survivors they discuss to visit the students and answer questions, with the Parent Teacher Organization supporting the effort.
The guest this year is a surprise.
Barry hasn’t decided how she will spend the $25,000 she won, but she has her eyes on visiting the Anne Frank House in the Netherlands.
Campus staff, including Barry, will meet soon to discuss how to spend the earnings awarded to the campus.
Like the lessons she has worked to perfect over the years, she wants it to be something that will endure.
“I want it to be something impactful,” she said. “I want it to be something that lasts … something to be here that the kids will be enjoying for years to come.”
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