HARLINGEN — She started out as a young girl from Matamoros applying for naturalization.
Now, Alicia Noyola is the Harlingen school district’s first Hispanic woman to serve as superintendent.
After former superintendent Art Cavazos submitted his resignation late last year, the Harlingen school board named Noyola the lone finalist to fill that position.
In early January, she was formally hired as the district’s new superintendent.
She immediately began receiving messages from people about her being such an inspiration to young girls.
Noyola, who previously served as the district’s chief academic officer, has had a long trajectory leading up to her current position, a pathway that began in Matamoros where she was born.
Her mother and grandmother were U.S. citizens — from Los Indios — but many of her relatives farmed their own land near Matamoros.
She remembers moving to the U.S. when she was five.
“I still remember. I have this memory of my mom and my two aunts. We had to go take our naturalization pictures,” she said. “We were in the back seat and my aunts. They were fiddling with my hair, and they were trying to get it just right for the picture.”
When she and her brothers and sisters first moved north of the border, they lived in Hargill where her aunt resided.
She attended kindergarten and first grade at a small campus. She has great memories of her years there.
“There was always love in our home,” she said. “My parents always kept us fed and dressed. Those were not things we children worried about. They didn’t have the educational background to really understand how the school systems worked. I was a product of a public school system that supported me along the way.”
Her father was a Mexican citizen who became a resident alien in the U.S. after moving with his family, which ultimately included Noyola’s nine brothers and sisters.
By the time second grade rolled around, the family had moved to San Benito, where she continued her public school education until graduating in 1986 from San Benito High School.
She wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted to do at that point.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to study and education was a highly-regarded profession,” she said. “My parents were very supportive. They had a lot of respect for school teachers, so I made the decision to go into education.”
It was a good fit from the start.
She knew she loved kids, having a whole household of siblings to engage her throughout her formative years as well as numerous nieces and nephews later on.
“I think it wasn’t until later that I truly discovered that education was the field where I belonged,” she said. “I think very early on I had some experiences that reinforced that, experiences when I was growing up and experiences when I started teaching.”
She recalled vividly an anatomy and physiology teacher in high school.
“She loved what she did,” Noyola recalled. “She created experiences that were unique and were different for us as students whether they were dissections or blood type analysis, just a lot of different things that I had never experienced.”
She spent her first years as an educator teaching seventh-grade math at Berta Cabaza Middle School.
“I loved middle school kids,” she said. “I could relate to them. I found you could really impact what direction they were going to go. For all the quirks they are going through as teenagers, they yearn for guidance and they listen.”
She went on to teach at Coakley Middle School for a couple of years.
She then took up a leadership position at the University of Texas-Brownsville.
She continued her leadership roles at other campuses in San Benito and Harlingen before becoming Harlingen’s chief academic officer in 2013.
Throughout this time, she carried with her the inspiration of her high school teacher’s intriguing approach to education.
“I always remembered those experiences when I went back to the classroom or when I started teaching,” she said. “Those experiences really focused on how do we create environments where children are excited about learning. Those things were exciting to me, they were real world experiences, it wasn’t focused on textbooks.”
The concept of authentic, real-world experiences has become a focal point in the Harlingen school district’s current initiatives.
When Noyola was named lone finalist in December for the superintendent’s position, she pointed out her in-depth familiarity with the workings of the district.
This, she felt, made her the best person to continue the work of Harlingen schools.
The school board agreed.
