By By LYDIA GRIMES – Features writer
Time changes everything, so the saying goes, and it is now making another change at Pollard-McCall Jr. High School. Principal Danny Norwood is retiring and stepping down from his position at the school. Taking his place as principal is the familiar face of one who has spent most of his life in or near the school.
Hugh White will leave his job as math and science teacher at Pollard-McCall and begin his first administrative job when he moves into the principal's office on Feb. 1, 2006. He is busy these last few days as a teacher and going to meetings to learn more about what he will be doing. But most of his co-workers have no doubt he will fit into his new position very well.
Jennifer Hall is the guidance counselor at the school.
Kaki Baker, a teacher at the school, agrees.
With fellow workers who feel so good about him, he has already made a good start at taking over the reins at Pollard-McCall. He is thinking about the things he would like to do in his new position and although he wants to continue many of the programs begun by Principal Norwood, he has some ideas of his own.
The staff is made up of 16 teachers, two aides and two secretaries, along with the principal, who are responsible for around 170 students who attend kindergarten through the eighth grade. Most of those who finish the eighth grade at Pollard will go on to attend Flomaton High School. This is not the case for all of the students. Some of them will go on to W.S. Neal High School and in some cases to T.R. Miller High School.
White is the son of Rep. F.P. &#8220Skippy” White and Clara White. He is the middle child, having an older brother, Todd, and a younger sister, Sarah Anne Fountain. He was reared to have good work ethics by his parents and worked at odd jobs all during his school years. He has worked on a farm, at the antique auction in Flomaton, at the Escambia County Co-op and other jobs along the way.
Although White said he loves working outdoors he admits that education was in the back of his mind. His mother was in education and it sort of came naturally to him and his sister, who works at Pollard-McCall and also at Flomaton.
He attended Pollard-McCall from the time he was in kindergarten all the way through the ninth grade. He graduated from Pollard in 1989 and then attended Flomaton High School, graduating in 1992. He graduated from Jefferson Davis Community College in 1994 with an associate's degree in arts, and graduated from the University of West Florida in Pensacola, Fla., in 1996 with a bachelor's degree in middle school education.
He was offered the opportunity to come back to Pollard-McCall to substitute teach when another teacher took a maternity leave, and was hired to teach math and science there in the fall for sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. He also became the boys' basketball coach.
He began to have the idea that he would love to return to college to earn a master's degree in administration so that he would have career options when the opportunity came along. He continued to teach while he went back to college at the University of West Florida where he earned his master's degree in 2002 with a GPA of 3.97. Last year when Principal Danny Norwood decided to retire, White saw that the time had come to make a move and he applied for the position.
White married the former Traci Killam of Flomaton in 1998 and they are the parents of two small children. Daughter Mattie is 3 and son Jack is 10 months old. His wife is a sixth grade teacher at Flomaton Middle School and they live at Pollard. They are faithful members of the Pollard United Methodist Church.
White says he loves to garden and plays the guitar and sings a little at church. He loves to read, especially books by C.S. Lewis, and he spends most of his free time with his family.
Pollard-McCall has been named an A+ school. It is one of two schools in the county and 113 in the state to receive this recognition. It is awarded for meeting state requirements for adequate yearly progress (AYP) for two consecutive years.