Fermin Leal serves as a communications specialist for Orange County Department of Education's Communications and Media Services Department where he works to highlight news and successful education initiatives at OCDE and at public schools across Orange County.
Before joining OCDE, Fermin worked as an education journalist for 15 years, most recently at the nonprofit education news site EdSource. Prior to that, he worked for the Orange County Register. In this role, he wrote features and news articles about career and college readiness, the state’s implementation of the Common Core and Smarter Balanced exams and challenges facing students in higher education.
A year-long competition testing students’ ability to design and engineer products that can help address real-world problems culminated recently with...