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It’s been open for months, but the official ribbon-cutting for the new Ellen Ochoa Middle School in Prince George’s County happened on Thursday, so that its namesake could be there to help cut the actual ribbon at the Maryland school.
Astronaut Ellen Ochoa told students and school leaders that her grandparents, who immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1870s, would be astounded and honored to see their family name carry on at the school.
“I hope that makes it a little bit more real for the students,” said Ochoa, who added that she gets excited visiting every school named after her. This makes eight now, she said. “I love being able to see staff, teachers, work on exciting and inspiring their students too.”
Students were indeed inspired to meet the astronaut.
“It encouraged me to reach for the stars, like she did,” said Mearel Dorber, an eighth grade student at Ellen Ochoa.
She previously went to Charles Carroll Middle School and said she didn’t know much about the person her old school was named after.
“I don’t know who Charles Carroll is,” Dorber said. “You can’t be what you can’t see. So to attend a school and to meet the person that it’s named by is very honorable to me. It encourages me to do more.”
Ochoa credited the public school education she got growing up in California for sending her to Stanford University for her doctorate degree, and eventually into outer space. Ochoa was the first Hispanic woman to go to space in 1993 and served as director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, from 2013 to 2018.
“It was my launchpad to college,” said Ochoa. “And led to everything I’ve been able to do since then.”
That includes her time helping build the International Space Station in the late ’90s.
“What everyone in the Astronaut Corps shares in common is not their background, not their gender, or their race or ethnicity,” she said in a speech to students. “But motivation, perseverance and desire. The desire to learn and participate in the voyage of discovery.”
