George H.W. Bush New Tech Odessa science facilitator Lornalynn De Leon has had an eventful year.
She earned her U.S. Citizenship, took a group of her students to the Texas Association of School Boards Governance Camp in Galveston, mentored the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program for NTO, which was a finalist to go to the International Space Station, and capped it off with the Secondary Teacher of the Year award.
De Leon and Marti Smith, the Elementary Teacher of the Year at Ireland Elementary, will move on to be nominated for Region 18 Education Service Center Teacher of the Year honors.
DeLeon still can’t quite believe she was chosen out of all the secondary teachers in the district.
“It is still surreal. It’s unbelievable. Every time they asked me (what she thought of winning), my answer would always be I’m humbled,” De Leon said.
She said NTO Principal Gerardo Ramirez, who will soon be working for The Sewell Family of Companies, kept asking De Leon if she was going to be at school on the day they were awarding employees of the year.
“And I said, yes, sir. I have so much stuff to do why would I be out and he was like, just checking,” De Leon said.
She saw people walking by and didn’t know why.
“It was indeed a very good surprise,” De Leon said.
De Leon teaches neuroscience and biology. Anatomy will be coming next fall.
At the end of the school year, she had been with ECISD for four years. However, she has been teaching for 22 at all levels — elementary, middle and high school.
She teaches freshman and seniors at New Tech.
“I’m molding them and then I let them go; let them go to the real world,” De Leon said.
She added that winning the award makes her want to work even harder.
“If you’re that teacher of the year, people will look up to you. … I feel like I’m an inspiration because I have a lot of Filipino teachers here in the district. Some of them reached out to me and … congratulated me and they said that I was an inspiration to them, to continue working hard and just do whatever you’ve got to do every day,” DeLeon said.
She added that she would like to thank everyone who has helped, supported and believed in her along the way.
De Leon graduated from a public high school in the Philippines and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of the City of Manilla with a degree in biology. She is working toward a master’s degree.
She added that she loves what she does for now — high school biology and neuroscience — because she went to school for biology.
“If I have to pick … where my heart is, it will be high school,” De Leon said.
”I love the activities. I love the experiments and I really do love challenging students’ higher-order thinking, PBL (Project-Based Learning). I love PBL,” she added.
She’s found Project-Based Learning is a really effective way to each. PBL is where students learn by engaging in “real-world and personally meaningful projects,” the PBLWorks website said.
“It gives the kids ownership of their learning. For a lot of people they would say oh, it’s science. It’s just memorization. But when you do PBL, project-based and problem-based learning, it helps the students explore more. It helps widen their horizons. It really helps them in critical thinking,” DeLeon said.
She and her husband, Jonathan, have a daughter who will be a senior next year at NTO.
Ramirez, the NTO principal, said he is excited for De Leon.
“It’s very well deserved. I know this has been a great year for her — receiving her U.S. citizenship, becoming New Tech Odessa’s teacher of the year for the 2022-23 school year and then also advancing to the secondary teacher of the year for the school district,” Ramirez said.
“She’s really a great teacher to work alongside with. She genuinely cares about her learners. She shows up and gives her best every day. I’m excited to see what the rest of her future holds in her career as a teacher. She’s one of our best; one of our rock stars,” he added.
Ramirez added that she is a perfect fit for the campus.
“This is her fourth year with us at NTO. She gets the pedagogy; she gets instructional practices,” he said. “She truly gets project-based learning and is a builder of student culture.”
“She seamlessly uses technology. She is definitely one of our model facilitators,” Ramirez said.
