Jorge Pacheco

Advisory Board Member

Pronouns: He/him/his

Committees:

Jorge was born and raised in the Oak Grove School District, where he has been serving as a school board member since 2018, to two working-class parents. His mother escaped the Salvadoran Civil War and his Maya-Korean father left his whole family and ancestral village in Mexico to give Jorge and his four sisters a chance for a better life.

Despite his parents’ sacrifices, Jorge struggled in school and barely made it out of the K-12 system. De Anza Community College was his second chance. Thanks to his family and mentors, he worked hard and transferred to UC Berkeley where he graduated with a degree in Anthropology and Legal Studies as a first-generation college graduate. Jorge continued his studies and earned a master's degree in Urban Education: Educational Policy and Administration from Loyola Marymount University.

Jorge has been an elementary and middle school Native Studies, Spanish, and English teacher in the Bay Area since graduating from UC Berkeley in 2013 and is now working as a 7th grade English Teacher at the Menlo Park City School District. Jorge served as president of the Oak Grove School District Board of Education in 2021 and currently serves as president for the California Latino School Boards Association, where he leads an organization that represents and fights for Latino students and school board members across the state. Jorge is also a national award-winning teacher, having won the prestigious National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship in 2021 and was appointed by the California State Board of Education to help the California Department of Education create Ethnic Studies curricula for the state in 2019.