Illustration by Daniel Bejar

A steady stream of sickness greets Matthew Baral and his student doctors every morning at Hamilton Grade School. His free clinic, tucked inside the gritty industrial sector of south Phoenix, is usually the only answer for the Valley’s poorest Spanish-speaking families.
It’s easy to see why: A whopping 80 percent of the families in the school district live at or below the poverty level. About 97 percent of the students qualify for free or discounted lunches. And Census figures show that the poorest neighborhood in the Valley is the area immediately surrounding Hamilton, where most families earn about $9,300 annually. Many of the parents are Latin Americans who are not U.S. citizens.
Here, the southern reaches of 19th Avenue lead to scrap yards, steel mills, trucking lots, railroad tracks and government housing. The road passes under the point where Interstate 17 becomes Interstate 10, then travels on to the Salt River and beyond.
It’s the kind of place where jet flyovers were once so frequent that Hamilton officials had to notify Sky Harbor if science classes planned rocket launches.
It’s the kind of place where district offices are next to a junkyard, where the smells of rendering and water treatment plants have wafted north into the schoolyard.
It’s the kind of place where the school’s dilapidated, syringe-covered baseball field drew so much pity from the Arizona Diamondbacks that the team built it a $1.2 million “Field of Dreams.”
Some people might call it “the ghetto.” District superintendent Paul Mohr, a former Hamilton school principal, offers another description.
“Hamilton literally is in the armpit of Phoenix,” he says.
Though it defies logic, this obscure corner of the Valley is an international model of how school districts can partner with privately funded clinics to offer a full menu of social services to impoverished communities.