There’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, from which she retires at the end of the spring 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,” Breckheimer says.

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 her mother 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 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. Debra 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 [walked] to El Camino [to] 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,” Debra 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 fast-track 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 [my husband], ‘Please, I’ll never ask for anything. Can I just get my master’s? I want to teach college.’”

Her husband was taking night classes for his master’s degree. But when they had their son, they traded places and he went to school during the day while she worked on her master’s degree at night. When she recieved it, she returned to El Camino.

“I remained in contact with a few of my professors … and I would visit them and ask ‘Hey, can I grade papers?’ There’s not one English teacher on this planet that would not be happy to give their papers away,” Debra Breckheimer says. “It’s a lot of work, and it’s difficult work.”

She started grading students’ papers. She taught a class for Professor Stephan “Steve” Waterworth. There were no teaching assistant positions in community colleges.

“I taught a class kind of for free for Steve and I had to get the dean’s permission and it was a big deal. But it really got my foot in the door, and I just loved teaching,” she says.

She also started teaching at Dominguez, but she went back to El Camino.

“I wanted to give back to a school that laid the foundation for my life and my ability to raise and support my family,” Debra Breckheimer says.

Four years after the birth of their son, the Breckheimers had a daughter. Life was good, until her husband was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2000. The doctors told them he had six to nine months to live.

Patrick Breckheimer lived almost four years. He died in 2004.

When Debra Breckheimer talks about her husband her voice softens, her eyes light up, the lines on her face relax and her lips break into a small smile. Breckheimer calls him her “greatest influence” and “the person that has had the most impact” on her. He was her biggest cheerleader when she was in college.

“If I had a struggle on a biology test … he would really be the one to encourage me,” she says. “And so I was very fortunate to have him in my life and quite frankly, I’m grateful beyond words.”

Her experience taught her how important it was to have someone believe in your capability to succeed, so she tried to be that person to her students. She used to teach pre-college classes when they were still being offered at El Camino.

“One of my favorite things about that was I was able to find students in my lower-level classes that were really a lot smarter than they gave themselves credit for,” Debra Breckheimer says.

She helped students develop a work ethic until they realized they too could be honor students.

English professor Darrell Thompson attests to this. Thompson was 24 when he was Breckheimer’s student in English 1C during the spring 1994 semester.

“She was the one who straightened me out,” Thompson says. “I was in her class early in the semester, and I submitted the draft of an essay. After she read it, her reaction was like, ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘What are you up to?’ ‘What is your next move?’”

Thompson says the impact one instructor had on him made him consider doing something he never thought he would end up doing for the rest of his life.

“I realized I am good at writing and that sort of thing,” he says. “She just kind of said, ‘Well, why don’t you go to Dominguez and get your degree in Ret Comp [Rhetoric and Composition] and come back here and teach?’”

Thompson followed Debra Breckheimer’s advice. He has been teaching in El Camino’s Humanities Department since 1998.

Her ability to change the trajectory of someone’s life isn’t lost on her, but she doesn’t think it’s unique to her.

“It’s nothing special about me, I just think that’s a teacher’s job, to encourage and pressure, then kick in the rear end,” Debra Breckheimer says.

With her husband’s illness, it wasn’t just a husband or a father to her children, but a great mentor she was losing. They decided to make memories with their children. They got a camper and drove along the California coast.

“We had a fifth wheel camper. So like a big trailer that goes onto a truck and I had to learn how to drive it,” Debra Breckheimer says.

Although it was sad when he passed, she prefers it this way instead of not having a warning.

“I don’t know how you deal with the shock (of unexpected death) and the lack of knowledge. At least I knew, and knowing is painful in its own way, but we had time to talk about lots of things, you know, that you wouldn’t want to talk about,” she says.

Unbeknownst to anyone, her husband had one final lesson to teach her, even in death. It was a lesson that served her well when she found out she had “almost stage four breast cancer” in 2012, three months after the death of her mother.

“My husband fought his cancer with a level of dignity and strength that I admire more than I can put into words,” Debra Breckheimer says. “He didn’t know this, nor did I at the time, but he taught me how to fight.”

Debra Breckheimer had a double mastectomy, a surgical procedure to remove both breasts, a month later. She counts the date of her surgery as the day she broke free from cancer.

“I’m in full remission,” she says. “I just hit 11 years. I’m very, very grateful. I’m very fortunate and I’m back to being pretty active, too.”

Debra Breckheimer usually wears high heels to work, but not today. Today she’s wearing green and white Adidas Stan Smith sneakers. The sneakers go well with her blazer, her standard office getup.

She just had surgery, unrelated to breast cancer. Nothing serious, but her doctor advised her not to wear heels for a while. Her daughter chose the sneakers.

“My daughter told me to go out with a bang,” she says.

She’s talking about her imminent retirement.

“I think I realized that it was time for me to retire because I love my work,” she says. “And I want to go out loving it. I don’t want to go out frustrated.”

Debra Breckheimer became the dean of humanities at El Camino 25 years after becoming an adjunct instructor of English.

“The reason why I left the classroom is mostly because I saw things that I wanted to change,” Debra Breckheimer says. “The previous dean was retiring, so the timing worked out.”

That desire for change was granted when she had to lead the faculty in revamping the department’s curriculum because of Assembly Bill 705, a bill signed on October 13, 2017, by former Governor Jerry Brown requiring community colleges to use high school performance instead of the traditional assessment tests to place students in math and English courses.

It was her baptism of fire as a dean.

As a consequence, the humanities department had to get rid of all lower-level classes, create a new curriculum and change schedules.

“We piloted the change a little earlier than the state demanded,” she says. “So that was huge.”

The other major project she had to face as dean was how to navigate classes during the pandemic.

“I had to take everybody online and then get them back to campus, so it’s been a lot of twists and turns,” she says.

Her parting gift is the Writing Center rebuild. Debra Breckheimer calls it her huge passion project. She got a new coordinator for the center, which is now the Reading and Writing Studio.

“It no longer looks like the DMV. So it looks like a cozy place that is inviting and welcoming for students,” she says.

While she’s quick to add that the credit is not all hers, she says, “It’s very important for me to see that get done. It took a lot of fighting to get some money to get some things changed in there.”

Administrative Assistant Michele Bynum says Debra Breckheimer takes students’ needs seriously.

“One of her strongest passions is student success, making sure that students have their questions answered; their concerns addressed when they come into the office. She always makes time for students as well as faculty,” Bynum says.

Therein lies some of Debra Breckheimer’s many frustrations.

“We really are the place for folks to have the ability to turn their lives around,” she says. “It’s just that they have to be able to have the ability to do that. And that doesn’t mean mental ability. It means their life can’t be so chaotic that they can’t sit down and write a paper. They can’t be so hungry that when they go to class they can’t think because their stomachs are growling.”

When she leaves the dean’s desk at the end of the spring semester, Debra Breckheimer will have served El Camino College for 30 years — 23 years as a teacher and seven years altogether as an interim faculty coordinator, interim dean and dean of humanities.

“I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. And that doesn’t mean that I feel like I’ve done everything right,” she says. “I’ve had an amazing professional life.”

Bynum says the dean is looking forward to a new stage in her life.

“Of course, she’ll miss everybody and miss what she’s doing. But I think she’s also taking the time to think about the next step in her life,” Bynum says.

Debra Breckheimer is happy to leave the seat and is excited at the prospect of a less stressful life, but she won’t “go quietly into the night.”

“I might sleep for a month or so, but you know, I’m gonna probably do something in health and fitness,” she says. “It’s my passion. It’s been what has really kind of helped me through all my health struggles and stress and everything. So I’m gonna first get certified as a nutritionist and I definitely want to do another triathlon.”

The shelves at her office are half empty, the framed photos of her loved ones are gone. The dean is wrapping up.

“I think being a dean has been an honor,” Debra Breckheimer says. “[It’s] something I never imagined doing.”

Editor’s Notes:

• Video was embedded on Tuesday, June 6.
• Headline was updated and photos were enlarged on Sunday, June 11.
• Caption was updated on Monday, June 26.