Longtime counselor Barela dies at 52

Thursday, March 6, 2003 | 9:43 a.m.

When Horacio Valdez was a student at Las Vegas High School, he was assigned to one counselor, but always went to another -- Roque Barela.

He would usually find three or four other students waiting outside Barela's office, but it was worth the wait.

"Like many others, I went to him for help because we all realized that he helped us because he cared," Valdez said Wednesday.

Now 23, Valdez credits the veteran counselor for pushing him to continue his studies. Valdez will soon graduate with a sociology degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Barela, a longtime counselor and educator, died in a car accident in Henderson on Saturday morning. He was 52.

Valdez was just one of many mourning the loss.

"I'm really speechless," said Julio Meza, another of Barela's students, after memorial services held at the LDS chapel on Treeline Drive Wednesday afternoon -- across the street from Las Vegas High, where the counselor worked most of his 12 years in the Las Vegas Valley.

"This is a man who gave and gave his all, making you feel like he was always there, no matter how many students were waiting, or what the school was asking of him," Meza said.

Like a utility infielder in baseball, Barela took on nearly all the jobs there are in schools, including counselor, teacher, and principal, during a career that spanned more than 30 years, according to his sister, Sophia Gurule y Barela. He had worked with the Clark County School District since 1991.

He also worked on four continents: Europe, Africa, North America and South America, and in four languages: English, Spanish, Creole, and Mende, which is spoken in Sierra Leone.

Working in different cultures and being from a family of 11 brothers and sisters who bore the language and culture of their Spanish grandparents made Barela sensitive to the students of all backgrounds who knocked on his office door, Gurule y Barela said.

Perhaps because he was one of only 11 Hispanic counselors among the district's 170 counselors, Barela found himself helping many children of immigrants from Latin America, which now make up nearly a third of the district's enrollment.

"In a way, his being Hispanic made you feel that he understood us, having gone through the same things," said Valdez, who studied at Las Vegas High from 1995 to 1999.

Barela found himself writing to Nevada's congressional delegation and speaking on repeated occasions about the plight of those who built stellar careers in high school only to find that their undocumented status as immigrants made them ineligible for federal grants to go on to higher education.

Meza, who was an A and B student, as well as president of the student body at Desert Pines High School, was one of those students. But the immigrant from El Salvador doesn't become a U.S. resident until 2004 -- a year after he graduates.

"I never asked him to take the helm in helping me with my situation, but he said we were going to find a way," he said.

For now, the solution has been to obtain scholarships from the state Millennium fund and the Latin Chamber of Commerce, neither of which require students to be citizens.

At the same time, Meza said, Barela taught him that you should help everyone, and not just those who are like you or your family.

"He used to say, 'If you're going to do something, do it for everyone,' " Meza said.

Barela, who leaves no immediate survivors, was to be buried today in his birthplace of Santa Fe, N.M.