By Aaron Orlowski
The round robin reading sessions were the worst part.
As the students took turns around the circle, reading aloud subsequent passages in a text, Zoila Gallegos would anxiously try to predict which passage she would be required to read, then practice it in advance. Distracted, she would end up missing the broader meaning and purpose of the text.
“I hated reading. The writing was even more difficult,” Gallegos said. “And since I wasn’t good at it, I was trying to find every excuse not to write. The scariest thing was a blank sheet of paper. I wondered how I would fill up the whole sheet with 500 words.”
Brought to the United States from Mexico by her mom when she was 2 years old, Gallegos grew up learning Spanish from audio tapes and English by watching TV, she said. Placed in a mainstream kindergarten class — bilingual education wasn’t in fashion in the 1970s — she was taught reading using the whole language approach, in which structured phonics lessons are given less attention.
“When they were trying to teach me these things, it wasn’t like I could go back on the Spanish and do a switch over. I was illiterate in Spanish, too. It was a double whammy,” Gallegos said. “I felt like I was always playing catch up.”
But Gallegos, who went to inner city schools, overcame those early challenges to not only graduate from high school, but then go on to earn a bachelor’s degree in English and master’s degree in counseling psychology from Mount St. Mary’s University in Los Angeles, plus a second master’s degree in reading education from Cal State Fullerton. Gallegos received the 2020 Distinguished Alumni award from the CSUF’s College of Education.
Today, Gallegos, 49, is an assistant principal at Brookhurst Middle School and lives in La Palma, after spending more than two decades working in Los Angeles County. The teacher-turned-administrator who used to hate reading has made a specialty of teaching literacy to at-risk youth.
“I’m always drawn to the ones who have fallen through the cracks,” Gallegos said. “The kids who get As or Bs, they’re going to be OK. They have everything working in their favor. But what about the kids that don’t have a structured home, that don’t have a family that loves them, that don’t have a two-parent household, that don’t know where their next meal is going to come from?”
Early on, Gallegos was labeled as gifted, opening up additional educational opportunities, including a partnership with the University of Southern California where she worked as a nurses’ aid in the general hospital during the summer. Talking to the patients in the pulmonary unit and listening to their stories, Gallegos began to understand the importance of interpersonal connections. She decided she wanted to study psychiatry or psychology in college.
Her family was shocked when Gallegos announced she was going to go to college, she said. By pursuing a college education, she was defying cultural norms that encouraged her to pursue the American dream by working hard — not necessarily going to college. As a woman seeking independence, she was labeled a troublemaker.
She graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles in 1988 and chose Mount St. Mary’s University, a small, private Catholic school adjacent to USC, affording it with a combination of grants, scholarships and working two jobs. As a teaching assistant, she taught Spanish-speaking third grade students struggling to learn English — and realized that other students also struggled with reading.
“There was so much reward in being able to help Spanish speakers kind of break the code. And they were so appreciative,” Gallegos said. “I understood their journey. I understood what they were going through. I said don’t give up, you have to do this, you have to try.”
She graduated from Mount St. Mary’s and in 1993 she started teaching, ultimately spending more than two decades in Los Angeles County schools. For 10 years, she taught convicted youths at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey.
As a reading specialist at the juvenile hall, Gallegos set up a small library that she stocked herself. It wasn’t nearly enough, especially since the students pilfered the books, she said. Gallegos didn’t stop them. “If they want to keep the book, I’m going to let them keep the book. These are kids that have never read a chapter book in their life,” Gallegos said.
So Gallegos advocated for a library, writing a letter to the county board of supervisors and challenging them to fund it. The county ended up allocating $1 million for a 4,000-book library for three years, including hiring a full-time librarian. The library opened in 2016.
Gallegos was the impetus for many projects at Los Padrinos, according to her former supervisor, Allan Edpao, who was an assistant principal there at the time, but now teaches in Huntington Beach Union High School District. Her commitment to students — and her humble background — enabled her to make a difference.
“These kids are broken. These kids are traumatized. But when they have a teacher who understands them and can meet them where they’re at and help them build their intrinsic motivation, that can help them,” Edpao said. “They can self-advocate and believe in themselves again.”
Around the same time, Gallegos earned a reading certification certificate, but felt that it didn’t fully prepare her so she decided to pursue a more in-depth program, enrolling in California State University, Fullerton’s master’s program.
“Once I got a taste of the science behind reading, that’s when I realized the importance of reading and how it’s fundamental to everything we do as human beings and educators,” Gallegos said. “It really gets you to think about things outside the box, outside your current situation. Reading is bigger and more important than math. And it can be of bigger service if you hone it.”
Statewide changes in juvenile detention policies were reducing the need for teachers in the juvenile detention facilities, and Gallegos saw the writing on the wall as rounds of layoffs hit. It was time to move on, and she needed a new challenge. So she earned her administration credential and landed a job in the Anaheim Union High School District, starting at Anaheim High School before moving to Brookhurst Junior High School in Anaheim, where she is currently assistant principal.
On a typical day, she’ll be handling student discipline one minute, organizing a book order the next, then managing a disgruntled employee or taking a parent’s phone call. She still uses her literacy background to help other teachers do their jobs better.
Students remember teachers not for the precise lessons they impart, but for feelings they inspire, Gallegos said.
“If we want to teach other to be resilient, we have to be vulnerable ourselves. We have to know our strengths and weaknesses and instead of running from our weaknesses we have to confront them head on,” Gallegos said. “Education is such a powerful key for those kids to really change the trajectory of their lives. And I’m a living testament of that.”
