The town of Lone Butte in the Gila River Indian Community is made up of 21 tract homes and sits within the enrollment boundaries of Ahwatukee’s Desert Vista High School. Photography by Brian Goddard

Loretta Avent has had an interesting and challenging career – from the White House to Phoenix – but she has never fought as hard as she has in the past few years for a group of poor American Indian high school students.

She had no idea her life’s work for civil rights and justice would come to a head at this beautiful school, and that she’d risk everything for nine poor American Indian children.
Desert Vista High School, located in the Ahwatukee Foothills area of Phoenix, is not only the newest high school in the Tempe Union High School District, but perhaps the best. Every year, close to a dozen seniors earn perfect SAT scores, the dropout rate is low and the college-bound rate is extremely high. Its athletic teams are the pride of the area. This is where engineers from Intel and other high-tech firms send their children. Most interesting to Loretta, the school was then headed by a black man, principal Joe McDonald, and black people held several other administrative and teaching positions. If parents were looking for role models of color, Desert Vista was their destination.
But Loretta and her husband, Jacques, a former assistant to the city manager of Phoenix, lived outside the boundary lines of Desert Vista. So Loretta used the one loophole that would let Brittany enroll: Children of school employees automatically are accepted. So Loretta got a job as a school security guard.
She started at $10 an hour, which eventually rose to $10.10 an hour. And there would be nothing remarkable about a doting grandmother getting a job to help her granddaughter, except for who this grandmother is and what happened next.
Loretta came to her security guard job fresh from the White House. Under President Bill Clinton, she was a deputy assistant and White House liaison to the American Indian community and one of the record numbers of black people Clinton appointed. The Phoenix Business Journal credited her with being one of the Arizona contacts that prompted President Clinton to visit the Valley in June 1999.

Loretta Avent became a Desert Vista High School security guard so her granddaughter could enroll there.

She is not only a friend of Bill’s but a friend of Hillary’s, too. Hillary, who calls Loretta her “friend from Arizona,” even made a special trip to Loretta’s home to “hang out” in early 2004. Long before her White House stint, however, Loretta was a follower of Martin Luther King Jr. and worked for Reverend Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential bid.
For those who know Loretta, there was nothing strange in the former high-powered Washington operative and civil rights leader becoming a high school security guard. They knew that Loretta, who was 62 when she took the security guard job, considers all work honorable, and they knew she’d do just about anything to be sure her precious grandchildren got every possible chance to succeed. (She and Jacques – “Nonna and Poppie” – took over raising their grandchildren, Brittany and Bryant, when their son’s marriage fell apart.)
And there’s a third thing her friends say is very predictable about Loretta: If she sees injustice, if she sees prejudice and discrimination, she attacks like a mama lion. It’s like it’s in her DNA and she can’t help herself.