Photography by Yuvie Styles.
Lipscomb Elementary teacher Zoraida Bustos sees her role as more than dispensing knowledge.
To Bustos, who was recently named Lipscomb’s Teacher of the Year, it’s about relationships.
Though she had different jobs throughout her life, Bustos knew, even from a young age, that she’d end up as a teacher someday.
She moved with her family from Mexico to Brownsville, Texas, when she was 5 years old, and she grew up in South Texas.
Bustos studied psychology and sociology at the University of Brownsville, now called the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her first job out of college was with Child Protective Services, where she stayed for five years.
But then she had her first son, and she and her husband wanted to continue growing their family. So things changed.
“Working with CPS was a high-risk job,” she says. “You work 24 hours a day. You’re on call on the weekends. Sometimes you go out on calls at 2 in the morning, 3 in the morning. And so that was the point that we realized that I wanted a more stable job for myself and for my family.”
She had already completed an alternative teaching certification, just as her sister, an educator in Austin, did. Once she passed her assessments, she was ready to become a teacher.
An aunt of Bustos’ husband, who had been working at Oran Roberts Elementary School for over 15 years, encouraged her to work at Dallas ISD. In 2015, Bustos was hired as a second-grade dual-language teacher at Lipscomb Elementary.
When she was hired, she thought she’d never want to teach fifth graders “because, you know, attitude,” Bustos says. But now, as a fourth and fifth grade teacher, she doesn’t think she could go back to the younger kids.
The material she teaches her students is different from what she learned as an elementary schooler, so Bustos prioritizes thoroughly understanding the subjects so she can make sure her students grasp the concepts.
Interactive activities are a strategy for student comprehension. One of her students’ favorites is what they call the “buzz game.” Bustos has buzzers like those used in TV game shows, and students use them during reviews to signal that they want to answer questions. She even created a store, where students can use points accumulated by answering questions correctly to buy prizes such as books and candy.
Bustos’ work stood out to her peers at Lipscomb, and they selected her to be Teacher of the Year.
“I honestly take that with immense gratitude and honestly makes me super humble because I’ve always compared myself to the best teachers out there, and I’m always trying to strive to be like them,” she says.
Eventually, Bustos says she would love to become an instructional coach for math. But she hasn’t let go of one of her earlier career goals, working as a school counselor.
Her husband encourages her to move into the administrative side of education, but Bustos says she prefers working with children, rather than adults.
“I was very blessed to have amazing teachers while I was in school,” Bustos says. “So I just wanted to be that for my kids — be a safe place, somebody they could always count on and come back to talk to.”
