When Adam Garcia attended a Dallas ISD job fair last year, he didn’t know the path he was about to take would not only transform his life but also the lives of dozens of students.
“It all happened so fast,” said Garcia, now a theater teacher at Young Men’s Leadership Academy at Fred F. Florence Middle School. “It just seemed like it was meant to be. All the chips lined up. I had just literally gotten off a plane from Florida, where I was previously working [in the theater industry], but for whatever reason, I had the strength to go straight from the airport to the job fair.”
The job fair was a turning point in Garcia’s life because that’s where he met Maria Puentemejia, principal at YMLA at Florence, who mentioned to him that they were looking for a theater teacher. Garcia told her that he had grown up in the community and saw it as an opportunity to give back to the area that raised him and gave him his roots.
“At the end of my internship with The Naples Players, I realized that there was a lot going on with the theater industry,” he said of his decision to become an educator. “In order for me to make the change and the impact that I wanted to see in the theater industry, I had to start from the very beginning, and that’s in the schools.”
Having grown up in southeast Dallas, teaching at YMLA at Florence has brought Garcia full circle. He is proud to say that he’s a product of Dallas ISD—having attended Annie Webb Blanton Elementary School and John B. Hood Middle School (now Piedmont Global Academy) and eventually graduating from nearby Bryan Adams High School.
It was while Garcia was at Bryan Adams High School where he discovered his passion for theater.
“It was the first time I was exposed to theater,” he said. “I knew I needed a fine arts credit and choir wasn’t quite cutting it for me anymore. So I ended up joining theater and I honestly ended up falling in love with it on the technical side.”
Technical theater, which includes anything from stage managing, lighting, sounds, set design, costumes, etc., is Garcia’s forte. Nevertheless, he makes sure his students learn all aspects of theater onstage and behind the scenes.
“When I was in school, I wished I would have had this creative outlet because I liked to move around and I loved the energy of it all. I know there’s a lot of kids here that like to get up and work onstage and backstage,” Garcia said.
Garcia says that his students are able to identify with him for different reasons.
“My strongest connection with them is because I know what they’re going through. I’m not an outsider. I’m an insider who came back to show that there is more outside this circle, and that anything is possible,” Garcia said.
When the students pointed out that there were very little, if any, persons of color in the theater videos that were part of the curriculum, Garcia knew he had to make some changes.
“I had to really sit there and readjust my entire curriculum because they couldn’t see themselves in what I tried to show them,” Garcia said. Last fall, he had them create their own plays, where they were the writers, directors and designers. With Garcia’s guidance, the students directed and produced their own plays.
