{"id":27939,"date":"2019-12-26T01:16:49","date_gmt":"2019-12-26T01:16:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.englishforums.com\/news\/?p=27939"},"modified":"2019-12-26T01:16:49","modified_gmt":"2019-12-26T01:16:49","slug":"fil-am-teacher-flora-mata-school-eponym","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/fil-am-teacher-flora-mata-school-eponym\/","title":{"rendered":"California's 1st Fil-Am teacher: Flora Arca Mata honored, new K-8 school eponym"},"content":{"rendered":"

A newly-built elementary school in Stockton, California will be named after Flora Arca Mata, the first Filipino-American (Fil-Am) teacher in the state of California.<\/strong>
\nThis immortalisation was announced after the Stockton Unified School District (SUSD) unanimously voted to name a new K-8 school after Flora Arca Mata.
\nThe Fil-Am teacher was considered by many as a pioneer of teaching in the Stockton unified school for 32 years until her retirement in 1980.<\/strong>
\nMata gained prominence as the first Filipino<\/a> American to graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles and served as the first woman of color to teach at the Stockton Unified School District.
\nUCLA\u2019s \u201cBruin Women Firsts\u201d newsletter\u00a0<\/a>noted that she was hired during a time when it was difficult for minorities to secure teaching positions, and her work as California\u2019s first Fil-Am teacher paved the way for other Asian Americans in education.<\/strong>
\nThe choice of immortalizing Mata started when the Little Manila Rising, a Stockton-based organization composed of Filipino-Americans (Fil-Am) teachers, successfully launched<\/a> a campaign to put her on the list of the SUSD\u2019s survey to give the new elementary school a name.
\nThe school is currently supporting construction and is projected for completion in June 2020 and occupancy August 2020.<\/strong><\/p>\n

California\u2019s first Fil-Am teacher<\/h2>\n

Flora Arca Mata, California\u2019s first Fil-Am teacher, was born to Jose Arca and Victoria Salcedo in Honolulu, Hawaii.<\/strong>
\nShe was the second youngest of six siblings and the first American Filipino<\/a> woman to graduate from UCLA, where she received her certificate in teaching.
\n

\"Fil-Am
Flora Mata and her husband, Vidal Mata<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nMata after graduating college married Vidal Mata, and both were teachers for Stockton Unified School District.
\nFlora taught for 32 years, continuing to substitute after retiring in 1980.<\/strong>
\nIn 1940, the couple decided to move to the Philippines to teach until the duration of World War II.
\nWith the help of Karloff, the couple was able to return to Stockton where Flora started her teaching career in California under the SUSD\u2019s jurisdiction for more than three decades. Flora\u00a0continued to work as a substitute until she was 80 years old.
\nShe died at the age of 95 in December 2013 and is survived by her son, Eddie Mata, and daughter, Vida Longley-Mata.
\nThe Fil-Am teacher has 21 grandchildren and great-grandchildren to whom she had instilled the importance of education, and Californians are grateful. She lived a beautiful, wonderful life and missed by her friends and family.<\/p>\n

Extensive history on Mata<\/h2>\n

The Stockton native Dawn Mabalon has written extensively about the history of Stockton\u2019s Filipino community. <\/strong>The author of\u00a0\u201cLittle Manila Is In The Heart\u201d<\/a>\u00a0shared transcripts of interviews she conducted with Flora Mata a decade ago. Fil-Am teacher\u2019s relatives shared photographs, old and recent.
\nIt’s enriching to know that during her time, it was a great honor to teach and students have great respect for their teachers regardless of color. Are times drastically changing? Is teaching no longer a revered profession?
\nStudents complain that their teachers’ lack of mastery of their subjects causes them to transmit the same ignorance. The end result is that students mock their teachers who dish out “irrelevant, incorrect, and outdated information.”<\/strong>
\nWith the Internet within easy access, students can easily crosscheck information.
\nWhile we believe that every student who attends school should be rewarded with fruitful learning to equip them for life, we commend teachers who are interested in technology to aid teaching and thus, derive some sense of deep reward for their labor and more respect by their students.
\n 
\nPhoto from: Ha-Insta<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A newly-built elementary school in Stockton, California will be named after Flora Arca Mata, the first Filipino-American (Fil-Am) teacher in the state of California. This immortalisation was announced after the Stockton Unified School District (SUSD) unanimously voted to name a new K-8 school after Flora Arca Mata. The Fil-Am teacher was considered by many as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":27940,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27939"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}