With a background as a teacher, school principal, university professor, and department chair in urban education teacher preparation, Viola Garcia has dedicated her career to inspiring future generations. Saturday, the veteran educator and school board member serving Aldine ISD in Texas began her term as the 2021-22 president of the National School Boards Association.

Speaking to attendees at the third general session of NSBA 2021, Garcia said she was “humbled to continue my public service at the national level with an esteemed group of school board members, education leaders from across the federation.”

She began her remarks with a brief pause to acknowledge losses suffered during the pandemic and the challenges that many have experienced.

Although confronted with a difficult year, school board members, teachers, school staff, and students across the country have “pivoted and readjusted,” as have state school boards associations and NSBA, Garcia said. “With the support of an exceptional board of directors and guidance from our new transformational leader, Anna Maria Chávez, NSBA embarked on a transformation that led us to refocus who we are and what we do, to better serve you, our members, the state associations, and, ultimately our primary beneficiaries, the students of this great nation.”

She urged school leaders to “support our young people to stretch beyond their highest dreams, to maintain a curiosity for learning, to pursue professional and service opportunities in their field, and to prepare so that when the opportunity to ‘step up’ presents itself, they will be ready.

“We must also be ready to continue to develop mindsets that see problems as opportunities and challenges to be solved,” Garcia said, “not as threats that require reliance on old deficit models, old thinking, yesterday’s dreams, and least of all, cause to retreat.”

Raised in a rural farming-ranching community in south Texas, “mine was a humble upbringing,” she told conference attendees. “My father died when I was 9, and I have attempted to live my life in a way that honors my ancestors, my parents, and especially my mother, who forged ahead to support her three children.”

Garcia is in her 28^th year on the Aldine school board. She is a past president of the Texas Association of School Boards, past president of the Mexican American School Board Members Association, and a member of NSBA’s National Hispanic Council of School Board Members. She was elected to NSBA’s Board of Directors in 2014.