When students return to Ellwood Elementary School for the start of another school year in just a few weeks, they’ll find someone new in the principal’s office — veteran educator Liz Rocha.

Eager for the academic year to begin, Rocha, a South Coast native, was named principal of Ellwood in late spring. She is taking the reins following the retirement of JoAnne Meade Young, who led the campus for four years.

“It’s a great feeling here,” Rocha said of Ellwood’s 19 teachers, support staff and families on the 400-student campus. “It’s a real community, a real team.”

Rocha took an indirect route into education, performing for many years as a professional jazz singer in Boston, New York and on the West Coast after graduating from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Musical talent is in the family genes — she’s the sister of Spencer Barnitz of Spencer the Gardener fame.

Performing and teaching, she said, have a lot in common.

“You’re always adjusting your performance to the audience,” she said, “working to elicit a response; it’s really about the relationship or interaction between the two, whether it’s the performer and audience or teacher and students.”

Rocha decided to change careers from music to education when she realized that performing wasn’t satisfying enough for her, she said, and that she wanted to be more involved with the community.

A product of area public schools, Rocha was most recently principal at Main Elementary School in Carpinteria, now closed due to declining enrollment. Prior to that, she taught at Goleta Valley Junior High, was an assistant principal in Oxnard and taught grades 4-8 in earlier years. The sixth-generation Californian earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish, master’s degrees in education and educational leadership, and her administrative credential all at UCSB.

When not hard at work as an administrator, Rocha likes to walk the family dogs with her husband, Marcelo, hike, ride bikes and explore the mysteries of coffee roasting — her husband has his own business as a coffee roaster.

Rocha’s enthusiasm for her work continually increases, she said.

“All the different relationships among people are what make education, including administration, rewarding and exciting,” she said.

Photo by Martha Lannan

Caption: Liz Rocha, the new principal at Ellwood Elementary School, was a jazz singer before turning to education.