To some, Mrs. Delgado is known as the sponsor of the Student Council, to others she’s an advisory teacher, but to most, she’s known as the AVID teacher. You may know her name and job, but do you know her story? 

   Delgado has been teaching for 14 years and has a background in AVID I, II, and III, co-taught IV as well as Spanish I and II, Pre-AP Spanish II and III for heritage speakers. For her, classroom teaching is about relationships and teaching real-world lessons to her students. 

   “I think what I love most about teaching are the life lessons I get to teach,” Delgado said. “Especially teaching AVID, there’s a lot of experiences that I can share with my students that are more real-life type experiences, and not so much academic, not that the academic part is bad.” 

    Classroom teaching wasn’t her first choice, but it has always been her underlying passion.

   “When I was a little girl, I always played school,” Mrs. Delgado said. “The teachers would give me the teacher edition books, and I would take those home, and I would set up my dolls on my bed, and they’d be my students, and I’d pretend that I was the teacher. When I was in high school, I had a history teacher who made learning fun. I graduated college, and I knew that teaching wasn’t going to be a career that made me a lot of money.” 

   She ended up getting a job at an insurance company, where she educated clients on insurance plans that seemed best for them. However, she ended up leaving the job due to its inconsistencies. 

   “As soon as I learned something, Congress would pass something that would make insurance either difficult to obtain for people or made it impossible for things to be covered,” Mrs. Delgado said. 

   So, she left and decided to resort to her “fallback,” teaching, in 2008. The rest is history.

   “I’ve loved teaching AVID since the beginning because it’s a class I would’ve loved to have in high school,” Mrs. Delgado said. “I would’ve been the ideal AVID student. My dad only had a sixth-grade education and my mom only got a third-grade education, so when it came to college, and what it took to be successful in college, I didn’t really have anyone to show me the ways. I didn’t know what was available scholarship-wise. I didn’t know what the process was.”

   AVID III, the junior level course, is a choice elective for students, versus AVID I and II as mandatory elective courses. Delgado has a large portion of the juniors this year who chose to be in AVID III.

   “I love what it shows students, I love the opportunities. So, when students are choosing to take it their junior and senior year, to me that really makes it more valuable, because now you yourself have the buy-in as the student to want to do better for yourself, and the fact that I had about 50% of the [Junior] class move up, to me that is a success on its own.”

   For Delgado, teaching is about building a family feeling and cultivating meaningful relationships. These enrich her life and make it all worthwhile. 

“[AVID] made me a better teacher overall, because all the strategies that AVID uses are very cross-curricular, it is definitely something that I would take into my Spanish classroom, and again, it’s the relationships,” Delgado said. “On my social media, I still text former students that are just wanting to give me an update on their lives, and, to me, my biggest thing is trying to make AVID feel like a family all on its own. The fact that these former students still feel like it’s still a family, even after they graduated, got married, and had kids, to me, is more satisfying than the money I don’t financially get. To me, that’s where the riches come in, are my students thriving in life.”