Photo by Jon Anderson.
Bumpus Middle School Principal Donna Burke welcomes students to school on April 14.
After 37 years in education, Bumpus Middle School Principal Donna Burke is hanging up her principal’s hat at the end of this school year.
The 58-year-old educator said the demands of the job have become so great that it takes away time from family and friends — and from taking care of herself. She no longer has the energy to do the job the way she wants to do it, so it’s time to pass the torch, she said.
She plans to take on some part-time jobs, but nothing more than two days a week.
Burke began her career teaching physical education in 1988. She spent a year at Highlands School in Birmingham and a year at The Donoho School in Anniston before she was hired as a physical education teacher at Simmons Middle School during former Hoover Superintendent Robert Bumpus’ first year, she said.
She worked nine years at Simmons and 10 years at Hoover High School. She also served as a volleyball coach at Hoover High for 20 years, including 17 years with the varsity team. In 2010, she spent about six months as an assistant principal at Deer Valley Elementary School before coming to Bumpus as an assistant principal in 2011.
The Alabama Association of Secondary School Principals named Burke the Assistant Principal of the Year in 2018, and in 2021, she was promoted to principal, replacing Tamala Maddox.
MIDDLE SCHOOL SWEET SPOT
Burke said she’s had the chance to experience a wide range of roles in education — elementary, middle and high school, public and private school — and she enjoyed them all. But she found her true passion in middle school, where students are at such a key age developmentally.
“They are unique. They are fun. They are complicated,” she said. “In middle school, you make more of an impact than ever.”
Students are trying new things and making decisions about their interests, and “our job is just to encourage them and give them those opportunities,” she said.
Burke said students learn more than just academics. They’re learning to listen, ask questions, take notes and say thank you.
One of the first pieces of advice she received as an administrator was to greet students every day and tell them good morning. The first semester, she usually gets only a few grunts in return, she said, but by the end of the year, the kids are saying it before she does.
She believes strongly in building relationships with both teachers and students — and that meaningful learning grows out of those relationships.
Her biggest joy, she said, is seeing students grow and develop into successful adults. The hardest part is seeing a former student in the news for committing a terrible crime and wondering what she and others could have done differently.
Many current Bumpus parents were her former students at Simmons, and she said she loves seeing how far they’ve come.
TECHNOLOGY PROS AND CONS
Burke said one of the biggest challenges for her in recent years has been dealing with technological changes and the impact those technology tools have had on children.
During and since the COVID-19 pandemic, she has learned that technology can either make you or break you.
While there are a lot of advantages to having access to technology, some kids are literally addicted to their cellphones, and they’re getting exposed to things online that they should never see or do, she said. She read a book called “The Anxious Generation,” and “I believe everything it says,” she said. “Things are just coming at kids and coming at us 90 to nothing, and we lose relationships, and we lose important time because we’re just in such a hurry. That’s a real challenge now. … It’s unchartered territory for sure. … We’ve got to pay attention to that.”
Anxiety and depression are more of a problem than ever, Burke said.
“These kids are hurting, and they’re not sure how to handle connection skills and coping with hard things,” she said.
She grew up old school when kids handled things on the playground and learned how to have hard conversations with their peers there, but a lot of kids today don’t know how to have those conversations because they’re glued to their phones all the time and text instead of talk, she said. And so many kids are losing self-esteem when they don’t get the likes on their posts they would like to see, she said.
“Life’s a lot more complicated than it used to be,” and these kids’ frontal lobes are not developed enough to always make the right decisions, she said.
“We’ve got to be there to pick them up, and they’ve got to know not to do it next time,” she said.
She has encouraged teachers to try to find a good mix of using technology and using some old-school methods. “I bought 10,000 pencils last year so the kids and teachers could have them,” Burke said.
Sometimes it’s good to actually write out your math problems and work on them by hand, she said. And she encourages teachers to sometimes have their students read real books instead of putting all assignments on the Chromebook, she said. “It has to be a nice mix.”
WHAT SHE HAS LEARNED
Burke said that over time, she has learned to be more reflective about her actions and decisions so that she doesn’t make the same mistakes over and over and she is trying to do a better job of mentoring other people because she knows she had a lot of good mentors who poured into her over the years, and she wants to pass that knowledge along to those who will follow her.
Photo by Jon Anderson.
Donna Burke, an assistant principal at Bumpus Middle School, checks in on students in English teacher Becky Mantooth’s classroom in December. Burke was named the 2018 Alabama Assistant Principal of the Year by the Alabama Association of Secondary School Principals.
“There were times in life when I thought I could do it all myself,” she said. She learned that she needs to accept help from others and not try to be a hot shot, she said.
She’s also tried to get better about asking for input for others when making decisions and to listen to people at every level. “I think we grow more when we do that,” she said.
When she worked at Simmons Middle School, her former principal, Carol Barber, always taught her to think outside the box when looking for solutions for problems, she said. Instead of refusing to pursue a certain solution because it hasn’t been done before, sometimes it’s better to ask “why not” do it that way, she said. That’s often where positive growth happens, she said.
At Bumpus, one of their “outside-the-box” practices is that they don’t use bells to change classes because their different grade levels operate on different schedules. That way, they have fewer people in the halls at the same time, she said.
CLASS SIZE CHALLENGES
When asked what she sees as the biggest challenge for the Hoover school system right now, Burke said she thinks it may be balancing the numbers of students between the middle schools and making sure all students are receiving the same access to services and opportunities.
Hoover has a great school system and doesn’t lack for much, “but we do need smaller classes,” she said. “Every school needs smaller classes, which means more teachers.”
She believes the class sizes have gotten so large that they’re losing more kids between middle school and graduation. In her opinion, the ideal size of a middle school is 600 to 800 students, and Bumpus is now up to about 1,200 students, she said. That’s about 100 more than when she became principal four years ago, she said. “We have grown so much.”
She also believes the ideal size for a high school is not more than 2,000. Hoover High this past fall had roughly 2,900 students, though some of those students spend time at the Riverchase Career Connection Center instead of the main high school campus, school officials said.
But Burke said she realizes those calls are beyond her pay grade.
Burke said she and her colleagues have worked hard to build a strong climate and culture at Bumpus — one where people take a genuine interest in each other and work together toward shared goals.
Her predecessor, Tamala Maddox, taught her that “no significant learning happens without significant relationships,” and she has tried to carry on that line of thinking, she said.
“We’re not always perfect with all of that,” she said, “but I feel like this building is based on relationships, and I hope that continues.”
Burke’s successor will be Andrea Fordham, who currently is an assistant principal at Pelham Park Middle School. Read more about Fordham here.
