Beloved Kinder HSPVA teacher Patricia Bonner retires after more than 50 years

After more than 50 years, Patricia Bonner returned to the exact place where she started. Having instructed, mentored and befriended well over 1,000 students in that time, Bonner — the vocal chair at the Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts — found herself once again tasked with doing some paperwork.

Bonner makes a distasteful face when describing some of the aspects of 21st century teaching: the testing, the meetings, essentially anything other than spending time with children in the classroom. But her eyes widen just a bit in telling the story of a beginning and an ending at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, both taking place on the same downtown plot of land.

“The HISD administration was on this very spot,” she said at the site of the new Kinder HSPVA. “The land always belonged to the district. I thought they’d sold it. Turns out they just leased it as a parking lot. Which was smart, because the district couldn’t afford to buy land downtown. So in the summer of 1968, I came here to sign a contract. And I just put in my paperwork with my retirement papers. Everything right here in this spot.”

That piece of land has changed quite a bit recently. Earlier this year the school officially moved onto its new state-of-the-art campus, which was built over several years.