By: Ben Searles and Benji Gutierrez

Have you heard the buzz around the social studies hallway? It’s Mr. Loyola! Who is that you may ask? Mr. Loyola is part of our brand new Oakland Mills High School staff. He teaches social studies located in room 108. Mr. Loyola coaches the cross country team and leads “los escorpiones latino” at Oakland Mills. Mr. Loyola has also purported that he plans on doing indoor and outdoor track. Shifting to Oakland Mills for him has gone pretty well. He states, “the teachers are welcoming, super supportive, administration is as well, and so are the students, they saw me and accepted me right away. It’s been a great transition here.”

Mr. Loyola was born in New York and grew up in Prince George’s County. After he graduated middle school, he attended Reservoir High School. Some of Mr. Loyola’s interests involve watching anime, playing soccer, and running.  He likes to watch various amounts of anime. A couple are Dodoro, Attack on Titan, and Death Note. 

One very interesting fact Mr. Loyola mentioned, “I only had three front teeth when I was growing up. I lost the fourth one but the other three straightened up so you can’t even see the gap.”

According to Mr. Loyola, “I wanted to major in psychology and become a counselor but my scholarship only did my first 4 years of bachelors, so instead, I chose sociology as it tends to help out more with social studies.” 

He was motivated by his teachers at Reservoir to put effort into school. He has scrapped his original idea and now Mr. Loyola wants to be the teacher to motivate new generations of students to put their effort into school. As Mr. Loyola puts it, “Improvise, adapt, overcome.” 

We asked Mr. Loyola, what advice would he give to his students, his response was, “Be open to your teachers, they can’t read your minds, so if you have a problem that’s going on we can’t know unless you tell us”.  On that note, we are thrilled to welcome Mr. Loyola to our school and the Oakland Mills staff. We hope that this can be your welcoming hOMe!