Lora’s passion for job should serve district well
AURORA Lora has been running the Oklahoma City school district since mid-April, when she was named acting superintendent. Her first task was to cut $30 million from the budget for 2016-17, the result of a state revenue failure. That meant making the difficult decisions to let teachers go and close some schools, among other things.
The cuts were “devastating” for the district, she said at the time. Yet they have done nothing to dim her enthusiasm for her job — “I love it even more than I thought I would” — or her belief that the school district can improve in the years ahead.
The budget is “a huge challenge,” Lora told The Oklahoman’s editorial board last week. On the other hand, it has forced her and her staff to look for every efficiency, and to explore new ways to stretch the money they do have.
As a result, when the budget picture improves, “We’re going to be stronger and smarter and really poised to take Oklahoma City to the next level in terms of academic achievement,” Lora said.
That may seem optimistic, given that for years, the district’s reading and math scores have lagged those of students in other districts. The ills that afflict so many urban districts in the United States — high dropout rates, high poverty rates, large percentages of single-parent households, language barriers — are evident here as well.
Yet Lora won’t use those factors as an excuse “because I don’t think it’s the reason why our kids can’t achieve.”
It’s clear that she believes in her teachers and especially in the district’s students. She likely sees a little of herself in those kids — she was raised in a low-income area of El Paso, Texas, and only realized when she arrived at college how unprepared her district had left her.
“I just really believed we were capable of anything that anyone else was capable of, we just had to have people who could teach us, with the right supports in place,” she said.
Lora, 39, proved it at her first teaching job, with fourth-graders in Houston’s Fifth Ward. Her principal told her to pray that she could get 70 percent of her students to pass the state exam. All of her students passed the exam that year. Lora has seen successful students and programs at other urban districts where she was employed before coming to Oklahoma City in 2014. Why not here, too?
She acknowledged that the funding crunch impacts the district’s ability to help students who may struggle with mental health issues (which contribute significantly to chronic misbehavior in the classroom), or to implement programs designed to aid teachers. But her approach is to do all she can with what she has, and not dwell on what she doesn’t have. That’s the right way to go.
Lora, given the job full time on July 1, faces a long road. She leads a district with long-standing problems. She replaces a man who was in the job only about two years, and was out of pocket much of that time. She’s overseeing an office that, when she arrived as assistant superintendent in 2014, had no one overseeing schools’ math or science curricula. She worked to remedy that problem. Lora says she was drawn to the district two years ago by the people and the spirit of Oklahoma City. And it’s clear she’s convinced that those things and some elbow grease will produce better days.
“I truly believe that in five years, we are going to be a district that this whole nation will be watching,” Lora said. We wish her only the best as she works to make that happen.