HARLINGEN — It has been said that we don’t choose the things we believe in, they choose us.
For Delia Gutierrez, that might very well be what happened.
“Becoming a teacher wasn’t a lifelong dream for me,” said Gutierrez, 51, who has taught fourth grade in the same Ben Milam Elementary School classroom for 13 years.
So she hadn’t planned to become a teacher, but she now has a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction.
“I started volunteering at Ben Milam when my son was four,” she said. “He’s 32 right now.”
She was in no hurry to proceed faster than her natural flow of ideas and experience instructed. She served quietly, diligently in this capacity for nine years. In the latter part of this tenure, she was invited to a conference where she met Jose Luis Cavazos, director of parental involvement/dropout prevention for the Harlingen school district.
“Because I had volunteered so long, he said he had openings,” she recalled. “I said that would be something I’d like to do.”
Thus began the next level of her trajectory as an educator. She was in fact now an educator of parents, providing valuable information on how they could better assist their children/students at home. In this capacity she built on her experiences for another six years.
During this time, she began attending school to become a teacher. Her new work as a truant officer provided more focus to her vision. In this capacity, she met with students struggling with attendance and sought to convince them to return to class. And that’s when she found her true passion, her mission.
“I decided I wanted to go to school and make a difference while they were younger instead of waiting until they were teenagers,” she said.
So that’s when she pursued her education with a sense of purpose.
In 2008, she earned her bachelor’s degree in early childhood through fourth grade from the University of Texas – Brownsville, now part of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
And it didn’t stop there.
She observed how many students struggled with mathematics. Desiring to address that specific challenge, she followed up in 2016 with a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis in math.
“I love being in the classroom,” she said. “I love being with the kids. I’m hoping that I make an impact on the children that I work with and that they become successful citizens.”
And the song keeps playing, a new verse and even a new chorus. One recent afternoon she was on her way to Jefferson Elementary School to serve as monitor for a UIL event.
