David Garcia is the kind of principal that can recite his teachers’ STAAR stats, just off the top of his head. He’s just that proud of their achievements, and all that Twain Dual Language Academy has done, both before the pandemic and since. 

He’s one proud principal, at Twain since 2017-2018 when the Dual Language Academy opened, when they said goodbye to their last eighth grade class as a comprehensive middle school and simultaneously said hello to the first classes of the Dual Language Academy.

An El Paso native, he attended St. Mary’s University and UTSA with a pre-med background, before being called into bilingual education. He earned his master’s degree at Trinity University and has spent 19 years in education, most of them in bilingual education, understanding the value of creating bilingual, biliterate and bicultural students. 

“When it all is said and done, even after you take STAAR out of the equation, the students are leaving us proficiently knowing two languages,” Garcia said. “We have made their brains that much denser, heavier, and more connected neurologically. They're able to use their linguistic repertoire and their schema to really expand on their learning.”

He prides himself in getting into classrooms, giving relevant feedback, and modeling strategies during the walkthrough, when the feedback can be received in context. 

“What a principal should be doing is spending a lot of time in classrooms, helping the teacher, seeing what’s going on, and also coaching the teacher, but coaching the teacher right there in the moment,” he said. 

He tries to spend as much time as possible with the students — unloading in the car line in the morning, working lunch duty two to three times a week, and using his famous stop sign to help parents and students cross the parking lot at dismissal. 

And the students appreciate him, too. On a recent twin day for world teacher week, a kindergarten student donned a tie, glasses, and a handmade stop sign to match Garcia.

“He came dressed as me. He had a little tie on and everything else,” Garcia said. “I thought it was so cute. I had to take a picture with him.”

But behind the scenes, he is also doing a lot of planning, a lot of deliberate strategizing with the instructional coaches about the methods that will work best for the students at Twain. 

“If we’re going to really have a high-performing school, we’re using the same strategies, the same common language, the same expectations, and the same materials,” Garcia said. "That really helps the students because they don’t have to re-learn a new way every year, they already know that the Problem-Solving Model is this way at Twain.”

As he walks through the halls of his 98-year-old building, Garcia talks animatedly about the beauty of the architecture, and the coveted space they have as a former comprehensive middle school. He proudly points to the student work on the walls, using vertically aligned strategies. 

He is proud of the school.

“What keeps me motivated is that I come to work every single day to work at the school that I opened, to work with the teachers that I hand selected, to work with a community of parents and students that really get it, that really appreciate the value of what we are doing here,” Garcia said.