A teacher who understands

Udelia Lopez hopes to help children with tough home lives like hers

By California State University, Bakersfield

July 12^th, 2021

This is one in a series of stories about some of the CSUB Alumni Association's 2021-2022 scholarship recipients.

Udelia Lopez still remembers the humiliation she felt when an elementary school teacher rejected the homework she’d submitted in front of the entire class.

She’d completed her homework with a blue colored pencil and the bottom half of a piece of notebook paper because it was all she had at home to work with. Her mother, neglectful in many ways, never bought school supplies, she said.

“I just felt horrible, so ashamed, because I thought I was doing something great,” Lopez remembered. “I was like, ‘I’m going to do my homework. I’m going to find a way.’”

Lopez vowed she would never make a student feel that way. She attributes the teacher’s behavior not to cruelty but lack of understanding what neglected children face at home.

Lopez is hoping to teach in communities with large numbers of schoolkids who’ve experienced the kinds of challenges she has, which also include time in the foster care system and the loss of an older brother, one who’d assumed custody of her, to gang violence.

“I believe I can understand them better. I can relate to them,” Lopez said. “I understand that it’s not their fault that their parents are not showing up for conferences or signing report cards or filling out papers to get a school lunch.”

After a seven-year derailment of her college career, Lopez earned an associate degree from Bakersfield College, bachelor’s degree from CSUB and in the fall will begin the prestigious Kern Urban Teacher Residency program while also working on her credential. She will teach alongside a mentor teacher in the Bakersfield City School District.

They are all remarkable accomplishments given from where she started.

Lopez is the second of six children born to what she describes as an “uninvolved” single mother who battled alcohol and mental health issues and barely scraped together enough money to afford one- or two-bedroom places to live.

Not only did her mother not buy school supplies but failed to show up for parent-teacher conferences or attend school events. Lopez felt subtle but definite “backlash” from teachers.

“They just didn’t understand,” Lopez said.

Her home life shattered the summer between her freshman and sophomore years at Arvin High when a family friend reported to authorities that her mother’s boyfriend was sexually abusing a young girl.

Lopez and her younger siblings were placed in foster care because their mother hadn’t reported the abuse, she said. Court and state records show the man took a plea deal, was sentenced to three years in state prison, and was deported.

Lopez’s 18-year-old brother, Heladio, took custody of her, her sister and younger brothers with the help of an aunt. Heladio attended guardian orientation classes, cooked and cleaned, fought his mother in court, and worked in the fields to support his siblings, Lopez said.

She adored him.

“I don’t have any father issues or issues with not having a male role model because my brother was always there,” Lopez said.

But in September 2009, Heladio was killed in a gang-related, drive-by shooting at Campus and Grapevine drives near Arvin’s police station. His body was left lying next to his car, according to a news account by KBAK’s Jose Gaspar that Lopez is grateful focused on her brother’s role as a family man and not his gang affiliation.

Lopez understands why Heladio joined a gang, saying: “It was not a good childhood.”

“We actually got to see his body and a tarp and that was just the worst experience ever,” Lopez said tearfully. “After everything that had happened, that was the worst. Nothing can ever beat that.”

A year later, Lopez graduated from Arvin High and enrolled at CSUB expecting success and an easy life. But school was hard.

Back then, Lopez said, there was just one early morning bus from Arvin to CSUB and one evening one back home. And then she discovered she needed a job to support her younger siblings because her mother wasn’t working.

Lopez dropped out of CSUB after one quarter and took jobs at Burger King and Vallarta Supermarkets. “You have to do what you have to do,” she said.

Udelia and her son, Eddie Lopez, pose at Central Park at Mill Creek in downtown Bakersfield.

It wasn’t until the birth of her son, the loss of a job and two of her siblings having turned 18 that Lopez decided to get her college education. She wanted to break the family cycle of dependence on government aid and set her son up for success.

She signed up for five classes at Bakersfield College.

“’Just give me any of the classes, whether they’re nighttime classes, whether the teachers have a horrible rating ,” she remembered saying. “’I don’t care. Just give them to me. I’ll take them.’”

While working two jobs, Lopez studied for her associate degree in early childhood education at BC and earned it in December 2018. Then she transferred to CSUB and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in child, adolescent and family studies in December 2020.

In the fall she will be able to focus on her teaching career full-time thanks to a Kern Urban Teacher Residency stipend, substitute teaching opportunities and scholarships.

Lopez doesn’t know what school the residency program will place her in, but she’s hoping for one in a low-income community with schoolkids similar to the kind she was.

“I’m willing to go anywhere, any age, any part of town,” she said. “I’m just excited to start teaching. That’s all I work for. So I can get in there and work with children.”