(October 7, 2009) — On June 19, 2009, the last day of school, Clark lost a teacher, a friend and an inspiration, when engineering teacher Luis Herrera passed away at his home. During his two years at Clark, Herrera was able to adjust his teaching from the college to the high school level, from lectures and reading to hands-on training. “He actually taught real-world applications,” senior William Shaler said. “It wasn’t just simple busy work.” Shaler, who resolved on becoming an engineer as a result of Herrera’s class, said the class gave him a “great grounding” to a life as an engineer: staying up until 5 a.m. to finish a robot, accepting failures and then fixing the errors and balancing realism with creativity. Shaler saw first-hand the results of hard work as he looked at the competitor robots in the underwater ROV competition held in May last year. “Ours was more technologically advanced, and I attribute that to Mr. Herrera and his goals,” Shaler said. Last year, Herrera received the Kiwanis Outsanting Teacher award. “He said this is the first award that he had ever received,” Assistant Principal Kristina Provost said. Shaler’s best memory of Herrera is 5 a.m. the day before the competition. While he and senior Andranik Aslanyan were exhausted from a sleepless night making the final touches on the ROV, Herrera was still honing the robot. “It’s like 30 minutes,” Shaler said. “But the way he was right when we were at five o’clock in the morning…everyone was tired; he was still really enthusiastic.” To Shaler, Herrera was more than a teacher. “He treated us like students, but he also treated us like friends,” he said. “He kind of saw through kids, and could kind of read you, and I appreciated that.” When technology teacher Roger Smith walks into the teachers’ lounge this year, he feels a heavy emptiness, hardly expressed with words. “The sadness of his death, that really…I don’t know—it’s kind of hard to believe that he’s not here anymore,” Smith said. He said that Herrera provided him with one of the highlights of his career: the field trip to a NASA Deep Space Network facility, which houses Herrera’s engineering products. His work automating the antennas gave him the honor of having his signature aboard Voyager I, the farthest man-made object in space. Before coming to Clark, Herrera taught electronics classes at GCC and had more than 30 years of engineering experience, including designing animatronics control systems for Walt Disney Imagineering, according to the GCC website. Dall said that Herrera was very proud of his Cuban heritage, and, according to the GCC website, in 1987, he was elected National Treasurer of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, which promotes students in all engineering fields. According to Smith, Herrera was able to motivate the unmotivated and educate the immature. “I think he just worked with them more one-on-one and said, ‘hey, this is what you can do, this is what you’re capable of. Show me,’” Smith said. Shaler valued the freedom Herrera gave his students to create their own engineering methods and to troubleshoot. “He didn’t give anything away, he expected people to contribute and the students did—they took up the challenge,” Dall said. Herrera is survived by his wife and two young sons.