For Jim Workman, the new principal of Buice Elementary School, those foundational years are where his heart is.
Starting his 27th year in education this year and his third year with Ector County ISD, the majority of Workman’s experience has been at the elementary level. Most recently he was an assistant principal at Odessa High School.
A native of Pecos, Workman earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Sul Ross State University and master’s in educational leadership from University of Texas Permian Basin in 2001.
Workman said he always wanted to go into education.
His father taught high school biology and chemistry from 1965-2011 with a year layout due to retirement. His sister has been at the learning center at Texas State University and working at the university level for about 20 years. His wife, Michelle, just retired after 34 years in education having served in many capacities.
Workman has two brothers and a sister.
The Workmans have two sons, Justin and Phillip.
Workman began teaching middle school science in 1996 and became an administrator in 2005. He has nine years of classroom teaching under his belt; five years as a high school principal; 10 years as an elementary principal; two years as a prekindergarten through 12th grade principal; two years at OHS; and now is the head principal at Buice.
Most of his experience is in Pecos, but he did stints at Seguin and Balmorhea, as well.
He’s gone from more than 4,000 students at OHS to 860 students at Buice where there are also 66 staff members.
“It’s the equivalent. It really is. There were 13 of us up there and there’s three of us here, so it’s kind of the equivalent, but elementary issues are way different from secondary issues,” Workman said.
“In high school, if a student decides not to go to class, he’s not going to go to class and here at this level they rely on mom and dad to bring them to school, so if a kid’s not coming to school, then we have to have those conversations with mom and dad. So it’s a different world. It really is,” Workman added.
Each year, he tries to set a personal goal and a professional goal.
His personal goal is to gain more knowledge, and his professional objective relates to reading — what’s required to be a good reader from a foundation of learning the alphabet into fluency, comprehension and phonemic awareness, increasing student attendance and making learning fun and engaging.
“The goal is to have all of that … culminate into a smooth operating campus, a great culture, a place where they want to be,” Workman said.
After so many years in education, he said he still enjoys seeing the children’s happy, excited faces coming through the door wanting to learn.
“You enjoy those sweet little surprises, like yesterday walking into a kindergarten class about 10 minutes before dismissal and your teachers are running around trying to get everybody where they need to be and organized … There was a 5-year- old sitting in the teacher’s chair reading a book to the class …,” Workman said.
Those are the kind of moments that make it worth it to him.
“I really appreciate the collaboration of teachers that support one another, share ideas and try to enhance their teaching skills all driving toward one goal. The goal is to make better students, better readers, better mathematicians. It’s not to blow the top off the standardized test. If we do everything that we need to up to those tests, then those tests are going to take care of themselves,” Workman said.
What he’d like to see is daily student growth.
“The end result will be that they’re going to be successful if we do what we have to do. I think there’s a lot of buy-in from the teachers, so it’s a good group of people. I can’t (say) enough good things about them,” he said.
He added that he tells his teachers they don’t have to go to work.
“You get to come to school; make it fun; make it to where they want to be here. We support one another, and if you’ve got that mentality then I think everything else will be good,” Workman said.
Cynthia Retana, an ECISD executive director of leadership, is pleased to have Workman in place.
“Mr. Workman is an experienced leader with a proven record of building capacity at campuses, and he will no doubt take Buice to the next level,” Retana said in a text message.
