From deployment to day job

Recently returned from Syria, geography teacher Michael Sanabria grateful for dual career in military, at McCallum

Courtesy of Sanabria

Twenty-year-old Sanabria poses for a photo during his first ever deployment to Afghanistan in 2006. Since then, Sanabria has served in Colombia, Hondurus, Korea and Syria.

Caroline Owen, co-people & co-sports editor
April 7, 2023

On Sept. 11, 2001, Michael Sanabria was a junior in high school. He lived in Cleburne, a small town 30 miles south of Fort Worth. He came from a military family.

“I always had it in my head that, in some capacity, I would serve in the military,” Sanabria said. “9/11 just kind of solidified it. I was like, ‘There’s so much happening in the world. I want to start participating now.’”

During his remaining two years of high school, Sanabria was sure of one thing: as soon as he graduated high school, he would join the military. And when he finally did become a member of the Special Forces in 2006 after 18 months of intense training, he was almost immediately deployed to Afghanistan.

“During the time that I was in, for those five years, it was crazy busy,” Sanabria said. “Back then, that was really the height of the Global War on Terrorism. Those deployments were super frequent.”

After his deployment in Afghanistan and a few months off, Sanabria was deployed to Colombia for six months. Soon after, he was deployed to Honduras. Then he came home, then right back to Honduras. While Sanabria tried to gain momentum with online college courses to start chipping away at his degree, he found it impossible to balance his job with his education. He also struggled to nurture his personal life while spending so much time abroad.

“It was all-consuming,” Sanabria said. “I couldn’t have a stable relationship, a family life or anything. You’re just gone.”

After five years of on-and-off deployments, Sanabria found himself wanting more. He decided to take a step back from the military to go to college and hopefully work as a teacher.

“I didn’t see myself being a military guy for my whole adult life, retiring, and that was all I did,” Sanabria said. “I wanted to get an education.”

When Sanabria decided to trade in his green beret and camouflage for a cap and gown, he wanted to do it close to home. He attended the University of North Texas for three semesters before his then-girlfriend led him to Austin. Being from New Jersey, she wanted to move somewhere more fast-paced than North Texas.

“She was like, ‘We can either move to Austin, or back to Jersey and you can go to Rutgers or something,’” Sanabria recalled. “I was gonna be a teacher the whole time. That was the goal. At UNT, I was in their teacher program.”

So when he got accepted into UT, he joined UTeach and immediately started doing internships at schools around Austin.

“One of those was my junior year in college, and that was here at McCallum,” Sanabria said. “I did an internship here, and my student teaching, and I’ve been here ever since.”

When social studies teacher Erin Summerville went on maternity leave during Sanabria’s year as a student teacher, he stepped in as her long-term sub.

The following year, he was officially hired. But for Sanabria, getting a teaching job didn’t stop him from being involved in the military. He had joined the Army Reserve and learned to balance yearly spring-to-summer deployments with his full-time teaching job.

In fact, Sanabria carried a briefcase of classified military documents into his interview at McCallum. Principal Mike Garrison had no idea.

“I actually was leaving the next day to go to Thailand,” Sanabria said. “I had to have the briefcase with me since I’d drawn some classified documents that I had to take to Thailand with me. I had to have them on me at all times, but I had to go to my job interview.”

While he only has to miss the last couple weeks of school most years, he occasionally lands six-month deployments that truly dig into the school year. In 2014, he was sent to Korea and in 2022 to Syria. According to fellow history teacher Joe Carcione, Sanabria’s past deployments make him a better teacher.

“When it comes to current events, it’s always good to talk to him and hear his perspective,” Carcione said, “especially when it comes to foreign policy.”

Sanabria is always open to questions about his job in the military.

“I say, ‘Ask away,’” Sanabria said, “I don’t have any issues talking about it, and that’s what I tell my students.”

Most of Sanabria’s discussions with Carcione, however, are about the culture and beauty of the place he went to rather than the training he did there. This remained true when Sanabria returned from Syria in January.

“That deployment, to me, was like, ‘Woah, Syria,’ because there’s so much going on there,” Carcione said. “But we talk about his overall impression of the place and his experience there more so than the details of the military.”

While seeing new places and serving his country are important pieces of who Sanabria is, he’s grateful that he can balance these things with a more settled home life in Austin.