Winds of change at Shumla could intensify world spotlight here

August 27, 2007
By Bill Sontag
Feature Writer

Dr. Carolyn Boyd, founder and director of Shumla School, enjoys an enviable, international reputation as scholar and teacher, persuader and communicator. “But someone told me when I started this project that I would be a fundraiser for the rest of my life,” Boyd said with a rueful smile, in an exclusive interview with LIVE! Friday (Aug. 24).

She is also a visionary who has surrounded herself with bright, intelligent staff and board members who also have visions of what Shumla School can become. And the emerging future seems to compel a name change and an increase in community participation.

The cautioning “someone” was Mark Lane, a former Shumla School board member from San Antonio, advising Boyd that her project – raising a campus, curriculum and teaching staff on the barest desert limestone – would demand her everlasting attention. Though she excels at fundraising, Boyd resists being consumed by it, and remains a bit frustrated by one vexing quandary.

Shumla – once a Southern Pacific railroad station and siding about 15 miles north of Comstock, as well as Boyd’s acronym for “Studying Human Use of Materials, Land and Art” – revolves around hands-on learning, discovery experiences, observation and introspection to bridge the lifeways of ancient peoples with modern studies of science, math, ecology, and art.

The school receives florid compliments from local and regional school teachers and administrators, accolades from leading scholars and researchers around the world, and wildly enthusiastic evaluations from students, arguably the core of gratification for the small staff and cadre of instructors. But, despite such warm endorsements, Boyd’s success with all-important fundraising has been largely limited to the generosity of big foundations hundreds of miles away, and corporate board members who have never seen the campus on the Harrington Ranch north of the Pecos River.

Boyd feels local communities that stand the most to gain from Shumla’s success should, therefore, seize more involvement and buy-in. Boyd has received exemplary support from local business owners, notably Bill and Sid Cauthorn at The Bank and Trust, McDonald’s store’s Martha Mendoza, a heartfelt donation from Kyra Fuller, Buena Vista Elementary School student, Val Verde Community Foundation, and smaller grants from Wal-Mart and H-E-B. And, recently, the school received a significant pledge of assistance from businessman Nick Khoury.

But while the envisioned future for Shumla School is clear in Boyd’s mind, the demands of continuing what’s been started and expansion to a world-class research center for archeology and anthropology are daunting. “I am a driven person,” Boyd said. “When I have a goal or a vision, I continue forward with whatever it takes to achieve that goal or vision. It’s just too hard to sit back and be content with where I am, when I see so much potential all around us!”

Boyd began her Shumla vision quest with close friend, scholar and associate Dr. Megan Biesele, now Shumla president emerita. Huddled in a cabin at Woodville, Texas in 1997, the two women hammered out a philosophical and practical framework for The School of Expressive Culture. The following year, the school was awarded a 501(c)3 non-profit designation by the IRS. Gradually, the name of the fledgling campus and emerging curriculum became known as Shumla School.

Boyd’s credentials are sparely written in a three-page curriculum vita, but they include her 1994 Bachelor of Arts in anthropology, and a 1998 doctor of philosophy in the same field, both earned at Texas A&M University. On a list of half a dozen university level courses she’s taught, Boyd has developed and taught “Anthropology of Religion,” “Anthropology of Art,” “Survey of World Rock Art,” “Field Methods in Rock Art Research,” and “Rock Art Theory.”

In the past 11 years, Boyd has delivered 13 professional papers and lectures to scientific councils, archeological and anthropological societies in Texas, Delaware, Minnesota, Utah, Virginia, Louisiana, and California. And Boyd is a fine writer, with numerous journal articles and book chapters under her belt. Her own book, Rock Art of the Lower Pecos, published by Texas A&M Press as an outgrowth of her doctoral dissertation, is already a classic of scientific literature and investigation, beautifully and amply illustrated by her own paintings of rock art in the region.

Boyd’s father, Walker Boyd, 78, now lives in Comstock, too, gutting and rebuilding old homes, long abandoned by residents who either died or moved away thinking – mistakenly in Walker Boyd’s view – that Comstock is dying, too. Boyd’s wife, Jody, passed away two years ago, so he came to Texas again from West Virginia. He was raised on a black land dirt farm near Eureka, Texas, but for 37 years, he was a chemical engineer for Union Carbide. Now retired for 20 years, Boyd is a thoughtful, provocative conversationalist, immensely proud of the accomplishments of his offspring, Carolyn, Austin, Laxson, and Timothy.

“I never wanted to be the ‘daddy in the back room,’” Boyd explained, so he’s now in his fifth comprehensive remodeling property, and he’s already eyeing the sixth house on the same lot. And these are not the parts of a recent collection. Back in Sistersville, West Virginia, Boyd restored several houses, as well as an old theater and a 37-room historic hotel. “As a family, we always looked for challenges,” Boyd said. “Whether it was working on a farm or climbing mountains, our happiness came from doing. Happiness is just a byproduct of having excitement and challenges.”

His daughter, Carolyn, is a fine artist, with particular bent and talent for portraits. “Her art is all people, and I think that’s what moved her in the direction of cultural anthropology,” Boyd said. “I tell her that what she’s doing now is an experiment to show that children, too, can be moved to greater understandings.”

Boyd’s associates in the Comstock headquarters of Shumla School use another concept – passion – to describe what drives their leader, Carolyn, perhaps because it pops up now and again in office conversation. Missy and Jack Harrington, owners of the ranch on which the school was built with their donation of 70 acres of land and years of hard work, saw Carolyn at work as a teacher, a professor from Texas A&M. Harringtons’ son, Danny, met Carolyn at Jack Skiles home in Langtry, and urged her and her husband, Dr. Phil Dering, to come to Comstock for a visit.

They accepted the invitation. In 1997, Dering, an archeobotanist and also a professor at Texas A&M, built a deep pit in the hard caliche clay on the ranch. He was conducting earth oven cooking analyses of energy used to build the pit and collect potentially edible desert plants, to be contrasted with measured calories of foodstuff resulting from the labors. “One night, we were all sitting around the pit – before he started any cooking – with our feet over the edge, and Carolyn talked about the education and research center she’d dreamed of building someday.

“Well, Jack and I went home that night, talked it over, and saw them the next day and said, ‘Why don’t you just build it here?’” Harrington said, adding, “And the rest is history.” Asked what persuaded the Harringtons to jump so quickly to such a philanthropic offer, Missy thought back to a class of Texas A&M students Carolyn had brought to the ranch for field archeology and anthropology exercises.

“It was just the fact that she was so involved in taking care of those kids, making sure they understood the importance of what they were doing. She went at it with such a passion, and you just don’t find that many teachers willing to do that. Clearly – to Jack and I – for Carolyn, it wasn’t a nine-to-five job. It was a life job.” The life job has evolved into a lifetime of commitment to growth, and now Boyd and the board of directors are considering a name change to project the anticipated increase in scope. One possibility under consideration is Shumla Institute, an International Center for Archeological Research & Education.

For Shumla school’s executive assistant, Angel Johnson, she signed up to help, first as an intern working at Amistad National Recreation Area for Park Archeologist Joe Labadie. With her academic training in museum sciences – from a Bachelor of Science in anthropology, 2003, at Texas State University -- Johnson catalogued museum collections at the National Recreation Area, bringing the park’s compliance to standards from 20 percent to 90 percent.

Because of cooperative relationships between the park and Shumla School, Labadie authorized Johnson to intern in Comstock and on the campus. Johnson hiked to the famed Halo Shelter rock art panel in Dark Canyon along the Pecos River with Boyd and Dering, served as an instructor of ancient paint-making techniques, and read Boyd’s book to develop a plan for the technical work of recording rock art as it appears on the region’s limestone walls.

“Carolyn is willing and interested in giving people great opportunities, and both her way of doing business and heart are simply remarkable. I’ve never seen somebody with such a clear vision, and she made me believe that if I could dream it, I could do it,” Johnson said.

“Well, our biggest challenge is the financial one, and it always will be,” said Boyd, adding that she thrives on all the challenges with her father’s words – “Hard work is the essence of the good life” – always in front of her. That’s the engine, but Boyd has her own thoughts on the fuel: “At the root of it all, it takes passion … and more passion … and a whole lot more passion!”

To learn a great deal more about Shumla School, see the organization’s fine Web site, www.shumla.org .

Angel Johnson, Shumla School executive assistant, first served in an internship position while she completed Bachelor of Science level university studies. Now, inspired by the leadership and vision of the school's director, Johnson aspires to complete a Master of Science in museum science at Texas Tech University, then continuing work at Shumla School. (LIVE! photo/Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge)

Dr. Carolyn Boyd listens intently to good news, Friday (Aug. 24) from Dr. Britt Bousman, professor and director of the Center for Archeological Studies, Texas State University. Bousman and Boyd are cultivating new internships for Texas State students at Shumla School, touted as a fulfillment of part of the two schools’ missions, while affording on-site assistance to ongoing programs. "They’ll be doing the basic 'grunt' work that goes along with the reality of any job," Boyd said, but adding that the interns will be exposed to a range of activities from archeological research to office accounting practices. (LIVE! photo/Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge)