Bumpus Middle School principal moves to Birmingham charter school

Bumpus Middle School Principal Tamala Maddox has resigned her post with the school to take a job as the middle school principal for the I3 Academy charter school in Birmingham.

Maddox has been in education for 31 years, including 21 years with Hoover City Schools, the past 10 as principal at Bumpus. Her last day at Bumpus will be June 30.

Maddox said she has always wanted to work with an underserved community where she feels like she can make a difference, and this new job will give her that opportunity.

She also had always said she would stay in Hoover City Schools at least until her children got through the school system, and her youngest daughter just graduated from Hoover High in May.

“I am going to miss Hoover. Parting ways is not easy,” Maddox said. “No one is running me off. I’m not fleeing anything … I have been real blessed to be in Hoover, leaving on a high note I hope.”

This new job gives her an opportunity to pursue a dream, she said.

The I3 Academy is a tuition-free public charter school. Last year was the first year of the school, and it served 420 K-5 students from a school in the Woodlawn community, Maddox said. The school this coming year is adding a sixth grade and plans to continue adding a new grade one year at a time until it is a K-12 school, she said.

She gets to become the first middle school principal, shepherding 100 sixth-graders on the former site of the Saint Barnabas Catholic School across from Eastlake Park and preparing for future growth and a larger facility somewhere as grades are added, she said.

The three Is of the I3 Academy are to imagine, investigate and innovate, and the school’s mission is to empower learners to become agents of change to solve the problems they see in their world, according to the school’s website.

The middle school will have a heavy emphasis on math and reading, social-emotional learning, project-based learning and science, technology, engineering, art and math curriculum, Maddox said.

She’s looking forward to having an impact on the future of young people without some of the bureaucracy that comes with a school system, she said.

She’s not saying there has been a lot of bureaucracy in Hoover schools, she said. She has had a lot of freedom with site-based leadership in Hoover, but the charter school will allow her even more freedom when making decisions about things such as personnel, curriculum and instruction, she said.

She has a lot of work to do to get a new middle school up and running, including everything from developing a safety plan for the school to choosing a mascot, she said.

“I’m excited and learning a lot and taking it all in,” she said. “The possibilities are limitless.”

Maddox spent the first 10 years of her education career as a high school math teacher in Georgia. She moved to Hoover in 2000, taught math at Hoover High for three years, became an assistant principal at Bumpus in 2003 and has spent the past 10 years there as principal.

She served as president of the Alabama Association of Middle School Principals in the 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years and is president again for the upcoming school year. She also served as president of the Council for Leaders in Alabama Schools in the 2018-19 school year.

The Hoover school system currently is taking applications to replace her as principal at Bumpus.