Winning the Elementary Assistant Principal of the Year was definitely a surprise to Denise De Loera.
De Loera is now in her seventh year in education, all with Ector County ISD and mostly at Buddy West Elementary School.
This year, she is going to serve as a principal fellow at Pease Elementary.
Her principal at West told her they were going to have some visitors on a particular day and time and to “be ready.”
“I had no clue and then they called my name and it was beautiful. It was just a beautiful experience,” De Loera said.
She added that it comes down to the team you work with.
De Loera started as a classroom teacher at West and then took on the assistant principal role.
The school was still relatively new when she arrived. She was mentored by excellent teachers who were part of creating the original mission and vision for the school.
“It was an honor to work with them because that school was their baby, essentially,” De Loera said.
Pease is becoming a primary years International Baccalaureate school in the 2025-26 school year.
In 2018, for accountability purposes, the ECISD Board of Trustees combined the attendance zones and reconfigured the grade-levels for Pease/Noel and Zavala/Travis elementary schools.
This change meant Pease served the students in prekindergarten through second and Noel served the same students in third through fifth grades, with the same arrangement for Zavala (prekindergarten – second) and Travis (3rd – 5th grades).
“Today, all four campuses are in good academic standing and the opportunity exists to bring these elementary families back together into one building” according to district information.
De Loera said she is excited to join the team at Pease because there are a lot of changes coming up.
“Pease for the last few years has been just a pre-K through second grade school and now they’re bringing on third, fourth and fifth graders,” De Loera said.
“They have a lot of programs that I’m excited to be part of, to learn about, such as the Blended Learning. They do a lot of that. They’re going to start learning about the IB program. I know that I’m going to learn a lot and it’s going to grow me professionally and personally. It is bittersweet because, like I said, I had worked at West for my whole educational career and they’re like a family to me.”
The principal fellowship program is an ECISD pipeline to prepare aspiring principals.
Sydney Garcia, who was an assistant principal at Pease, is going to West as a principal intern.
“Both ladies are well on their way to leading their own campuses. I wish there would have been a Principal Intern pipeline between AP and Principal before I had my own campus. It will set them up for success,” Pease Principal Micah Arrott said.
De Loera said she will be shadowing the principal at Pease to learn all the responsibilities to prepare her to become a principal in the future. The fellows also will be exposed to middle and high school campuses and see how their leadership works.
Arrott said she is thrilled to have De Loera on board.
“I am extremely excited about Denise being our Principal Intern with us next year. She’s going to bring a 3rd and 5th grade perspective that Pease will need as we transition,” she said.
De Loera said she has lived all over — from California to Wyoming, Arizona and Nebraska. She spent most of her time in Rock Springs, Wyo., whose economy is similar to Odessa, but it’s a smaller town.
“My parents were always part of the oilfield and they experienced a lot of boom and bust, but I think it’s easier to sustain a livelihood here because it’s such a big city. I call it a city. It’s not a town to me,” De Loera said of Odessa.
“They they found an opportunity down here, and so I followed them down not thinking I was going to end up in education, because that’s not what my background is. But I started off looking for just a job to do. I was going to substitute and then I found out about the internship that they had for teachers at that time. I did it through UTPB as an alternative certificate route,” De Loera said.
She taught her first year, but didn’t have the student teaching experience.
“That’s why my mentoring from those teachers was so important,” De Loera said.
“In retrospect, it really does feel like this is a career field that’s meant to be,” she added.
She earned an associate degree at Western Wyoming Community College and a bachelor’s degree in microbiology from the University of Wyoming thinking she would go into the medical field.
She applied to Medical Center Hospital, didn’t have a certification, so she was advised to get one and come back. Meanwhile, she started to substitute teach and found education was her calling.
De Loera got alternatively certified from University of Texas Permian Basin, and a master’s degree in educational leadership, also from there.
She added that she sees herself in the students and hopes they see themselves in her and hopefully be inspired.
“That’s the goal to leave some sort of mark in other’s lives,” De Loera said.
