If you ever got a birthday card from Tere Pierce, it arrived three days early, had glitter in it, and was signed “your favorite.” She was. Teresa Ochoa Pierce died on August 14, 2026, in Tucson, at 69, after a short illness she refused to talk about at dinner.
Tere grew up in Nogales, the oldest of five, and spent 31 years teaching third grade at Wheeler Elementary, where she kept a class tortoise named Mr. Peabody and a drawer of spare socks for kids who came in from the rain. Former students still stopped her at the grocery store. She remembered every one of their names, and most of their spelling words.
She loved loud music, hot sauce on everything, the first monsoon storm of the summer, and her porch at six in the morning before anyone else was up. She could not sing and did it anyway, mostly Linda Ronstadt, mostly in the car. She took up pickleball at 64 and became a menace.
Her husband, Dan, says she proposed to him, in 1979, in a laundromat. Her daughters say she taught them to change a tire and to write a thank-you note in the same afternoon, because both are things a person should know.
Tere is survived by Dan, her husband of 46 years; her daughters, Marisa (Jon) and Celia; her grandsons, Mateo and Eli, who were the light of her life and knew it; her sisters, Lupe and Carmen; her brothers, Ray and Tony; and a small army of former students. She was preceded in death by her parents, Manuel and Josefina Ochoa.
Please join us for a celebration of Tere's life on Saturday, September 12, at 5 p.m. at Reid Park, Ramada 7. Wear something bright. Bring a story about her, and a dish if you like. In place of flowers, buy a book for a third grader, or give to the Wheeler Elementary library fund.