Extra Special Educator : Anaheim Teacher’s Winning Ways Shine as Finalist for National Award

Along with math, reading, current events, science and music, Belen (Bubba) Garcia’s students get daily lessons in self-esteem.

They don’t even realize it. It’s just part of the routine.

Each morning, 25 fifth- and sixth-graders line up outside Room 11 at Patrick Henry Elementary and take turns looking Garcia in the eye and shaking her hand hard. Once inside, they scamper around the room collecting 10 hugs and bidding each other “a good day.”

“I want them to do more than just survive. I want them to be strong,” said Garcia, citing a psychological study that showed children need at least eight instances of physical contact a day to survive. “Once they feel safe, and trust me, everything else is easy.”

Garcia--who must be just over 30 but refuses to disclose her age for fear she will be stereotyped--is the only Orange County teacher and one of five Californians among the 36 finalists for the Walt Disney Co.’s American Teacher Awards, which will be announced Friday. She has been teaching only nine years, seven at Patrick Henry, and is only the second Orange County teacher to ever make the finals for the coveted Disney awards.

Colleagues and supervisors said it is Garcia’s endless devotion to her work, individualized caring about each student and commitment to letting children direct their own education that makes her stand out.

“It’s not something that Belen could put down on paper and say, ‘This is how I do it.’ It’s who she is, what she feels,” said Principal Patrick Hart. “Everybody here will go to Belen and ask for her ideas.”

She is notorious for the extras. Every student gets Garcia’s home phone number, and at least one calls every evening with queries about the homework or what to wear. Former students keep calling years after they leave Garcia’s class.

It was Garcia who suggested after-school computer-lab sessions in English and math, and it is Garcia who staffs those schoolwide sessions twice a week.

Each Thanksgiving, she organizes a feast to make sure all the students get a taste of turkey. In the spring, her class has a weekend sleep-over in her rented house as well as an out-of-town field trip to Pismo Beach or Monterey Bay.

In a school like Patrick Henry--where 99% of the 820 students are members of racial minority groups, more than half are on welfare, and 70% qualify for the government’s free-lunch program--her extracurricular commitment is crucial, principal Hart said.

“She just doesn’t stop. She’s their teacher 24 hours a day,” said Laurie Benson, one of two young teachers Garcia has trained as a mentor teacher. “A lot of us, we go home and we have our separate life at home. She doesn’t go home. This is it.”

For years, Garcia’s home was just down the block from the school in a neighborhood infested with gangs and drug sales, where gunshots ring out and sirens wail each night. She moved to Orange two years ago, so her off-duty work is mainly done now over the phone--though one recent afternoon she went home with a student who was racked by fear that her parents were going to hit her.

In class, Garcia is not a lecture-from-the-front-of-the-class type of teacher. She makes students plan projects, and typically has them work individually or in small groups. Pulling her guitar from its case one recent morning, she ordered them to move the desks and then joined them on the floor in a circle.

“Drug abuse is brain power abuse. . . . Abuse those drugs and your life you’ll lose,” the children chirped, clapping and swaying as Garcia strummed melodies she crafted herself. “If anyone offers you drugs, you just REFUSE!”

The anti-drug, anti-gang message that permeates Garcia’s classroom decorations and curriculum matches her involvement in the county’s Peer Assistance Leadership program.

She spearheaded PAL at Patrick Henry and meets for lunch weekly with 120 fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders. This year she started “junior PAL” for younger kids. Plus she’s a regular at countywide PAL training camps.

“She is an amazing lady, she is the most positive empowering force for children that I have seen,” said Elizabeth Arnow, who coordinates the county’s 700 PAL leaders. “There aren’t many individual human beings like her. . .we all just marvel at her.”

Raised in Greenfield, a Northern California town that had a population of about 3,000 when she was growing up, Garcia is the second of six children born to a Mexican mother and Texan father who struggled to earn a living through farm labor. In their bilingual home, going to college was a given; Garcia loved school and was always the teacher’s pet.

Once upon a time, she wanted to be a nun. Then she studied criminology at Cal State Fresno, on track to become a probation officer. But after stints working in summer camp and in a school for the children of migrant workers, Garcia decided the classroom was the route to helping children that involved the least red tape.

As a teen-ager, friends who ran in gangs, did drugs and got pregnant too young sought her ear. On the school bus, she always stopped bullies from picking on youngsters.

To her family, she’s a “crutch,” said brother Rodolfo, who is also a teacher.

“She was always a person that would put everybody else’s concerns or problems” above hers, Rodolfo Garcia said. “She’d make them her problems. She was always willing to help people, to solve their problems.”

Since Disney launched the American Teacher Awards four years ago, Garcia has watched on TV and thought, “someday.” With Anaheim school Supt. Meliton Lopez’s encouragement, she applied for the award last year, but did not make it. Lopez asked her to try again this year.

Now she’s competing in the general elementary category against a 75-year-old former vaudeville actress who has stood at the front of the same New Mexico classroom for 45 years and an Arcadia fourth-grade instructor who has suffered several strokes and is confined to a wheelchair.

National education experts will select a winner in each of 12 categories, and then the 36 teachers will elect one overall winner. The Disney Channel will give the winner $25,000, plus $25,000 to the winning school and the winning district.

What makes her most nervous, Garcia said, is having to wear high-heeled pumps and the evening gown Disney is having made special for Friday night’s awards ceremony: She is a blue jeans and sneakers sort. To make herself more comfortable, Garcia is bringing a traditional Mexican charra outfit--long black skirt, cropped jacket and cowboy boots--to wear at Thursday’s gala dinner.

True to her Mexican-American culture, Garcia wanted to bring gifts to Florida for the 35 other finalists, but was worried about the expense. So she asked her students to write the teachers letters, which they typed up Thursday in the computer lab.

Instead of lobbying for Garcia to win, the students praised the other teachers and wished them luck.

“Like my teacher Miss Garcia says,” wrote Joanna Sifuentes, 10. “Who says you can’t do something? Unless you try. . . .”