Educator Sam Perla, ED.D. ’22, and his family fled civil war in El Salvador to find better lives in the United States. Today, Perla’s 25-year career as a teacher and administrator in Orange County has earned him numerous awards, largely based on his innovative use of music and musicals to engage kids in learning — in the same schools he grew up in.
“I like to serve and help people. That’s my passion,” Perla says.
Last year, he won Parenting OC Magazine’s Top Leader Award for 2024, as well as the Administrator of the Arts Award from the Orange County Department of Education for Elementary Schools.
But Perla’s journey to teaching success in the U.S. began under the sounds of battle when El Salvador erupted into civil strife in the late 1970s.
“I remember the bombs and the war,” Perla says. “We learned to hit the ground next to the couch or go into the bathtub which was the safest place because you didn’t want to get hit by a bullet.”
When he was just four years old, Perla recalls his mother holding him and his sister, six years older than him, in the bathtub when violence broke out around them. The army was conscripting boys and girls as young as 10, so Perla’s parents collected enough money to send Sam and his sister to live with an aunt in Santa Monica, California. Their parents followed months later.
The family soon moved to Santa Ana, where Perla enrolled at Monroe Elementary. He repeated Kindergarten because he didn’t speak English, and was an English learner until 6th grade. He progressed through Santa Ana Unified schools — Jackson Elementary, Spurgeon Intermediate, and Saddleback High School — playing sports and showing an aptitude for music both at school and at the evangelical church his mother had started attending. There, Sam played drums and percussion at a young age, soon lending his talents to other area churches and later playing in the band at the Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., attended by then-president George W. Bush.
While some friends were absorbed into gang culture, Perla stayed on track thanks to sports and music. He gained acceptance to CSU Fullerton, where he studied kinesiology but struggled academically and considered dropping out. His parents didn’t know he was in college and thought he was going to work. Perla decided to re-commit to earning his degree, raised his grades, and had the honor of inviting his parents to his graduation.
“They were bawling,” he says. “I showed them where I went to school that day. We were there for hours.”
He married his high school sweetheart, whom he had met through music participation at church youth conventions, and the two had a son. He also changed career intentions after a church friend mentioned that being a teacher would allow him to pursue music in the summers. Perla applied and was immediately hired as a temporary substitute at his old school, Jackson Elementary.
From then on, his career sparkled — but first a significant challenge loomed.
While serving as a full-time teacher at Adams Elementary, “They gave me the most challenging class,” he says — and nothing seemed to help these language learners grasp English. At some point, the principal said, “I don’t know if I can hire you for next year because I haven’t seen improvement.”
With little to lose, Perla employed novel ideas he had developed, including the use of music and percussion in the classroom to increase vocabulary retention.
“I made songs and chants about dates, times tables, math facts, things like that, and that’s how the kids would learn,” he says. “I always wanted to do things out of the box. It worked. The kids stepped it up. It was pretty amazing.”
Because of this inventive approach, Perla won Walmart’s Teacher of the Year award in 2001.
“That was a big deal to me,” he remembers. “I thought, ‘Wow, I truly can do this.’”
He also continued to lend his talents on the bongos, congas, timbales, and more to popular Christian gospel artists, performing live with them and in recording studios.
“It was a split life, my music life and my teaching,” he says with a laugh. “When I was playing music with the guys, they were like, ‘I can’t believe you’re a teacher.’ When I was at work, it was the opposite: ‘I can’t believe you’re a musician.’”
On the education side, Perla and a friend co-founded a charter school at a local church, and then Perla rose through administrative ranks at a number of area public schools, serving as assistant principal, dean of discipline, and teacher to emotionally disturbed kids. He simultaneously coached school soccer teams and had some success in sports. All the schools were, to varying degrees, serving financially and socially distressed populations.
His next innovative leap came at Franklin Elementary, a TK-5 school where Perla saw a beautiful auditorium and felt inspired to use it to help kids excel academically — by participating in full-blown musicals. He launched the Musical Theatre Program by writing a grant for Disney musicals and made participation among 3-5th grade students mandatory. Good results flowed in as the kids grew personally and academically.
“You see behaviors go down, all this positive stuff,” he says. “I said, ‘This works. We’ve got to keep doing this.’
Perla, the principal at the time, personally directed the shows and created presentations using high-level lighting and sound. Parents cried to see their supposedly “shy” children performing and singing on stage. Perla put a special education student in charge of running the sound board, which he was really good at.
“People took pride in it,” he says. “Plus, it was fun and exciting, and the kids loved it.”
For his efforts, Perla won the Parenting OC Magazine Leadership Award and, separately, the Orange County Music and Arts Administrator Award for Elementary Schools, marking him as one of the County’s up-and-coming educational leaders.
He also kept advancing in his own education. Perla had earned a master’s degree in elementary education and dreamed of one day obtaining a doctoral degree in education. A friend’s strong recommendation pointed him to Concordia, where he enrolled.
“The program was amazing,” he says. “I met colleagues with the same passion, the same servant-leadership style. Concordia is really focused on that, which I really appreciated. The professors were great.”
Camaraderie and mutual encouragement made all the difference.
“Sometimes I said, ‘I don’t know if I can finish; this is too hard,’” he remembers.
But Concordia’s team-based approach proved itself.
“They told us we had to rely on each other, to pick each other up, and we did that,” Perla says. “We were like family. I didn’t expect it. We would pray before class. It was like, ‘This is awesome.’ You’re putting God first, having faith, and believing he’ll get you through this.”
He received his Doctorate in Educational Leadership from Concordia University Irvine in 2022 and went on to serve as a dissertation committee member for Concordia students.
“It’s been an amazing experience,” Perla says. “I read their dissertations, edit them, and give input. I try to motivate people to do the doctorate program. I tell them my story: ‘Look, I was able to do it. You can do it. Just plan and be organized.’”
Presently, he serves as principal at King Elementary in Santa Ana, a Title 1 school in a lowsocio-economic community near his teenage home.
“I feel a sense of confidence being able to tell someone, especially a kid who’s not doing well, that they can do it,” he says. “I say, ‘I did it, and I lived right over there.’”
Being on Concordia’s campus stoked Perla’s inspiration to teach at a university someday. He volunteers as a coach in his school district, mentoring assistant principals and others, and has served in various committees for the Santa Ana Unified School District.
And, yes, he continues to produce school musicals.