Class dismissed After 30 years in education, Humanities Dean Debra Breckheimer will retire from El Camino Story by Ma. Gisela Ordenes Photos by Khoury Williams
T
here’s a magnet in Debra Breckheimer’s office perched prominently on the filing cabinet above her desk. It says “Believe.” “Believe in yourself,” she says. “You gotta believe in yourself first. When I stepped behind this desk, I thought, ‘What the heck am I doing? ... And I’m just gonna believe that I’m gonna make it.’” By “desk” she means her desk as the Dean of Humanities at El Camino College, her job since July 2018 andwill retire at the end of the semester. Clad in a white-and-blue plaid blazer over a black shirt and black pants, the 63-year-old thinks before she speaks. She contemplates the questions but when she opens her mouth, her sentences come in rapid succession. The straightforward, authoritative manner with which she speaks contradicts the image of someone who had to wrestle with self-doubts. But self-belief was not something Breckheimer had a lot of growing up in Westchester, California in the 1960s. It was something she had to struggle with when she started college at 28. “I didn’t think I was college material at all, just like so many students today.” She’s come a long way since then, but the journey was anything but easy. Raised by a single mother, Breckheimer grew up with four brothers. “I’m second to the oldest so I was kinda like mom,” she says. Her parents divorced when she was 10. Her father had a massive stroke shortly after and couldn’t work. Her mother supported all five children by running a daycare center in their home, babysitting kids. When she found work downtown as a bank teller, her mother would take the bus every day, leaving the house at 5 a.m. “We’d know she was coming home because we could hear the sound of the grocery cart – chak-ke-chak-chak-ke-chak – on the pavement,” Breckheimer says. Breckheimer and her brothers had to work at an early age. She worked almost 40 hours a week and
86 | Warrior Life
had to forego college after high school. “I didn’t go to college. I had to work,” Breckheimer says. “We couldn’t afford for me to go to college, and we needed some help with my income.” Her thinking changed when she met her future husband at 23. Patrick Breckheimer was a teacher in South Los Angeles when they met. He grew up in a family of educators. Breckheimer describes him as someone who “had a great joy of teaching.” He eventually became an administrator, but grew up knowing he wanted to be a teacher. When they got married, her husband gave her the courage to go to El Camino. It was 1987 and Debra was 28. “I was very scared of school,” she says. “I lived over in Lawndale, and I walk to El Camino and take classes.” She debated whether to take math or English. In the end, practicality won. “We didn’t have a lot of money. So I needed to do it pretty quickly,” Breckheimer says. I had fewer classes to take for English, so I decided to be an English major.” She credits El Camino for instilling in her the confidence she carries now. “El Camino was a place where I started to gain my footing and feel like, ‘Wow, I am kind of good at this stuff,’” she says. She transferred to California State University, Dominguez Hills after earning her associate degree. She took as many units as she possibly could to fasttrack her bachelor’s degree. It was in the last year of her bachelor’s degree when she found out she was pregnant. That same year, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English, magna cum laude. “The plan was for me to teach high school. But when I was finishing up my bachelor’s degree and struggling to do this student-teacher work, I didn’t want to teach it,” she says. “I was a [teacher’s assistant] at Hawthorne High and I didn’t like it because I couldn’t teach the subject. ... And so I came home and pretty much begged him, ‘Please,