A healthy baby girl was successfully delivered at a Dallas Independent School District (DISD) campus, thanks to the experience and quick thinking of an elementary school teacher who had previously worked as a doctor in Venezuela.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, DISD has been recruiting educators from Latin America in an attempt to deal with its longstanding teacher shortage problem.
One of those educators was a Venezuelan national who had trained in obstetrics and gynecology named Maria Perez Caraballo, according to a news release from DISD.
She and her family had fled Venezuela in 2016, looking for opportunities and safety, which could not be found in her native country.
“When you leave your country, you need to have an open mind,” Perez Caraballo told the Dallas Morning News. “If you can’t follow your path of what things you planned for your whole life, you need to be open to change.”
After struggling to find work as a doctor in Costa Rica, Perez Caraballo found out that DISD was recruiting foreign nationals who spoke Spanish to teach, so she and her family relocated to Texas. There, she became a fifth-grade teacher at Kleberg Elementary, according to the DISD news release.
She was right where she needed to be last month when district parent and pregnant woman Loren Carcamo came in to pick up her daughter from school and went into labor on campus.
Knowing who they had on their team, campus staff called for Perez Caraballo over the loudspeaker. She rushed over to Carcamo and examined her, concluding that there was no time for her to be taken to a hospital, according to the release.
“While teachers are called on to do many things in the course of their work and career, this task was not a frequent or usual request. This event was a beautiful example of the importance of knowing your colleagues,” Alliance/AFT President Rena Honea told The Dallas Express.
Perez Caraballo ended up successfully delivering the baby in the nurse’s office.
“I’m going to treasure this,” said Perez Caraballo, per the DISD news release. “I came to this country, and I studied a lot to become a teacher, so it was like I said goodbye to those days in medicine. It was really amazing. I feel really happy to have had one more experience in this science area that I worked a lot in.”
While Perez Caraballo’s heroic story is remarkable, it is not out of the ordinary for the district’s teachers to go above and beyond for their students. Their efforts often receive little support from DISD leadership, which has been accused by teachers of misallocating teacher incentive funds and creating an unsafe working environment, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.
“The administration and trustees need to pay attention to the dedicated employees when they provide feedback to them and act on solutions proposed by those employees. These people are the ones doing the work every day in the campuses and worksites and provide first-hand knowledge of what’s working and what’s not,” Honea said to The Dallas Express.
