Brownsville Porter teacher wins H-E-B Excellence in Education Leadership Award
May 8-It has been a whirlwind week for Claudia Cortez, a CTE engineering teacher at Gladys Porter Early College High School, who on Sunday was named the 2026 winner of the H-E-B Excellence in Education Leadership Award.
This year, H-E-B awarded $480,000 in cash and grants to six teachers, two counselors, two principals, one early childhood facility, one public school board and two school districts.
Since 2002, the H-E-B Excellence in Education Awards program has awarded almost $15 million in funding to educators who go the extra mile to serve their students and their communities, the San Antonio-based grocery chain said in a news release about the program.
The Leadership Award honors teachers with 10 to 20 years in the classroom. Cortez traveled to Houston for a final interview on Saturday and an awards ceremony Sunday at the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown Houston.
As she waited with the other finalists for the winners to be announced Sunday evening, Cortez said the scene felt a little bit like the Academy Awards of teaching, with 60 some finalists, their guests, legislators from Houston and around Texas and others in attendance.
The finalists went through a final interview on Saturday before the judges made their final decisions in each category and the winners were announced.
Back in February, a team from H-E-B visited Porter, where they interviewed Porter Principal Rachel R. Ayala, and filmed a video with Cortez and some of her students demonstrating a robot the students built during class.
Cortez talked about the civil, mechanical and aerospace engineering skills she teaches to ninth through 12th-grade students at Porter.
The big reveal on Sunday came at the beginning of Teacher Appreciation Week.
"That's one thing I told the judges, teachers should be valued and recognized more often," Cortez said Wednesday in an interview with The Brownsville Herald.
At the Marriott Marquis, Cortez made a speech about her teaching. With more than 800 in attendance and with a video of her and her students showing on a giant screen behind her, she said it was a memorable experience.
"She has great partnerships with not only industry here in our community but with NASA, takes her kids to competitions, she does mentorship training at NASA every summer, she's a trained pilot. She's always looking for ways she can better herself and be a better teacher and invest in her students," Ayala says in the video.
"It was not only a win for me, it was a win for the whole school and our whole community," Cortez told The Herald.
H-E-B handed her two checks for $10,000 each, one made out to her and one made out to Porter Early College High School.
During the video Kimora Lee said Cortez's teaching has been inspirational for her.
"She has helped me grow as a person - personally, professionally and academically, through hands-on work and academic and leadership programs, which has helped me a lot," Kimora, a Porter junior says.
"Because she is a woman, a teacher in engineering, it's very hard for a woman to succeed in the industry, to kind of thrive in the industry as a woman, which has inspired me a lot," Kimora says.
"The impact I hope I've had as an educator is for them to actually learn how to build those connections with other industry partners. I'm hopeful for their futures and for them to actually go out into the field and be some of the greatest engineers and scientists that have ever existed," Cortez says in the video.
Cortez said originally she never thought of herself as a teacher, and went into manufacturing.
Due to the financial crisis of 2008 she sought something more stable and went into teaching, first at Faulk Middle School and for the last 10 at Porter.
She graduated Summa Cum Laude from a post-graduate program in cyber security at the University of Texas at Austin in June 2025. She holds these other degrees:
- Bachelor of Science in engineering management technology from the University of Arkansas Grantham, graduating Magna Cum Laude in September 2015
- Master of Business Administration from the University of Texas at Brownsville, graduating in 2009
- Bachelor of Business Administration in accounting from the University of Texas at Brownsville, graduating in December 2003.
As to the prize money, Cortez said she will meet soon with Ayala to decide where to spend the funds.
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This story was originally published May 8, 2026 at 10:58 PM.