Pacifica Stories

Amber DeBenning is in her first year as an English teacher at Pacifica, but she is no stranger to our school or to teaching. Two of her children, Zoe ‘24 and Moses ‘26, are excelling students and active members in many extracurriculars at Pacifica, and her husband Trevor DeBenning is our on-campus pastor. Beyond being a valuable member of our parent community, Amber is now contributing as one of our incredible faculty members.

Amber has lived in California for her entire life, and is the proud daughter of a teacher and a farmer who was raised to appreciate the value of working hard. In high school, Amber was a self-proclaimed nerd. She carried around a Scrabble dictionary to memorize 2-letter words so that she could compete against her other friends, and had a ‘cool words’ notebook to add to at all times because “the world is full of neat words that need to be remembered for future use.” Mrs. DeBenning says that while her nerdiness may have been laughable, it also paid off because she loved learning and was able to graduate a year early from UC Berkeley on full scholarship due to all of her high school AP and IB credits. At UC Berkeley, she majored in English and absolutely loved it. Mrs. DeBenning said it was so cool that her job was to read incredible books, learn from incredible professors, and write papers. Her biggest takeaway from this time in life is that “as you continue to build your life, surround yourself with the kind of people who encourage you to be more like Jesus. Take cool classes that you don’t necessarily have to take but that interest you. Don’t be in such a hurry to graduate.”

After graduating early, she used her extra scholarship money to attend an educator residency program at CSU Northridge that combined fieldwork during the day and coursework at night in order to get her teaching credential. As soon as she graduated from this program, she was hired by LAUSD to teach and dove right in as a just-married 23-year old. 

While she loved teaching in LAUSD, once she had her children, Amber wanted to stay home with them. They began homeschooling as a one-year experiment and have now been doing it for ten years! 

“I absolutely love being home with our kids and getting to teach them, and have now taught all subjects in every grade from K-8, and have taught high school English in 9th-11th grades,” said Amber. “I really do feel like the luckiest lady in the world to get to homeschool our younger two kids all while I see our two bigger kids thrive as students at Pacifica, and now also teach English at Pacifica as well.”

Mrs. DeBenning loves teaching for many reasons: getting to cheer on kids and creating a class that cheers each other on, seeing the aha moments, having conversations about real life that happen when relationships develop, praying for her students, and teaching them the joys of English. At Pacifica specifically, she is looking forward to being part of a community that truly cares about students learning to think and live well.

“It is my hope and prayer that Pacifica students would feel known and cared for by me and their other teachers in a way that would point them to the way they are known and loved by the God who created them,” said Amber. “I want my students to find beauty in the words and stories to equip them to better see the story God is writing with their own lives. Of course I want them to grow in their writing abilities and develop a love of reading (and maybe even not hate grammar), but doing it through the lens of a much bigger story than our own is the biggest treat.”

Mrs. DeBenning has been following Jesus for many years, which has influenced every aspect of her life. In her words, “Jesus changes everything.” Whatever she does, and wherever she does it, her driving force is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Whether it be at home caring for her family or in the classroom teaching, it is all for the glory of God.

In her free time, Amber loves spending time with the best people she knows: her four kids, husband, and boxer named Rocky. She loves cooking and baking, playing board games, wandering around book stores, walking around cool places in the beautiful city of L.A., discovering new coffee shops, watching movies, and spoiling their sweet pup Rocky!