New principal at Santa Paula High School
July 29, 2011
By Brian D. Wilson
Santa Paula High School
Elizabeth Garcia started out to enter medicine, but got sidetracked and discovered she loved teaching. Now Garcia is the new principal at Santa Paula High School, replacing Paul Marietti, who left for another district.
She was raised in Carson, California, where she was in a private school through seventh grade. After attending junior high she went to Carson High School. She attended UC Irvine for two years, and transferred to a small Christian college to finish her bachelor’s degree in biology. At that time she was interested in going into pediatrics.
She saw an ad for substitute teachers and thought that would be a good way to earn some money to further her education. She started out subbing in kindergarten, but quickly discovered this was not for her. “Kindergarten teachers are amazing people because they have to be so energetic, so I knew that was not what I wanted to do,” she said.
She substituted in middle school, but finally found high school was the place for her. After a time the principal asked her to consider coming on full time. She discovered the class she was going into had a different substitute teacher every day of the year. She said on her first day she must have looked nervous, because a student whispered to her, “Miss, it’s going to be okay.”
She stayed at Montebello High School for about a year and a half, when she found an opening at her alma mater and returned there as a teacher. Garcia taught for almost 12 years, when she was offered a position in the district office as a high school science expert. The job involved her sharing her expertise with other teachers. She performed that job for three years and, along the way, got her masters degree.
In 2009 she saw an ad for an assistant principal position at Santa Paula High School and decided to apply, because a change in administration in the L.A. Unified District meant her job was going away. She said she was a little overwhelmed at the size of the interview panel. Afterwards she was asked to stay in town for a second round the same day. She was offered the job and said she needed a week to think about it.
She lives in East Ventura and would like to eventually buy in Santa Paula.
So, how does she like the job so far? “Right now it’s a long list of things to get ready for the new school year,” she said. “So there’s the list of getting things done and then there’s the visionary part of being placed in a leadership position and having the opportunity to direct the vision of the school site. And that is very exciting to me, because I think a lot of the training that I was given when I was working with curriculum and instruction was a lot of leadership training and a lot of learning about what it takes to change a system.”
She added she has a lot of respect for the SPHS faculty. “I’ve worked together with them, gotten to know them and learned about what hard workers everyone is here and how much they are committed to students and the community, and I think that’s a great starting place.”
