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Principal of John B. Connally High School

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By Melissa Mixon Friday, 24 July 2009

Daniel Garcia

Experience: Principal at John B. Connally High School since December 2005 and assistant principal at the school from 2000-2004.
Hometown: Tahoka, Texas

When you interact with students, do you have a motto to give them?: My personal motto is based on how I grew up. It’s, “There will be no sand in my shoes at the end of the day.” It’s based from me growing up in West Texas and having to work in the fields and it just inspired me to go to school. My personal philosophy with the students here is just to afford them opportunities and prepare them for the world outside the campus, whether it’s going to junior college or going to the work force or Harvard and MIT, because we have students that do all of those.
When you have a range of students, those who may not care about their education to those who do, how do you find a balance to educate them all?: The rigor of the program has to be there for all of the students and it has to be engaging. If you have a young person not wanting to come to school, they’re usually disengaged because they’re bored and they’re not finding how this is going to help them in the future. Really, the challenge is to have our teachers prepare lessons that are engaging, that are rigorous and that are relevant for the student to want to be there.
What’s your favorite part about being a principal?: Just my interaction with the students and staff and community. I’m proud to be a part of the community and [be able to] open doors for young people where they may not have thought there was an opportunity.
What’s your least favorite part?: Dealing with difficult situations with parents. And it’s on a ton of levels, from discipline to talking to parents when students are unsuccessful to dealing with the loss of a student, like we did here recently. It’s a tough job because it does have some tremendous highs, [like] seeing a kid get into Yale, but then you get a call that you’ve lost a student. It’s from one extreme to the other.
As principal, how do you deal with the range of challenges you face?: What we do is to make sure that [those challenges] don’t go away and fall off of the radar, but by the same token [we make] sure that we stay focused so that we can do well on the TAKS test. This year we had an increase in our TAKS scores. Before we’d struggled a little but. You [improve] by staying focused and making a commitment to the instruction. I would say that our success is based on just the hard work of our students and staff. I have to bear and shoulder those responsibilities, but I think the biggest part of my responsibility is to make sure the teachers and students are hearing that and that it doesn’t become overwhelming and overbearing.
In this past legislative session, lawmakers approved replacing TAKS in the ninth grade with 12 end-of-course exams, starting in fall 2011. How do you feel about this?: It will be a challenge in a different format … I think I had just started [as an educator] when they used to do end-of-course exams. The challenges remain to be seen. I don’t know whether it will be easier to pass any of the tests or any more difficult. It’s going to look a little different, and it’ll have its own unique set of challenges.
Is there anything that you wish you could have told yourself when you started as a freshman in high school?: I would have said to myself, “Focus in the classroom as you are in athletics or in competitions,” because I was very competitive, but a lot of time I didn’t see the relevance.
Connally has one of the highest percentages of economically disadvantaged students. How big of a factor is that for your campus?: The number of our economically disadvantaged students is about 50 percent of our population. In some cases it does pose a problem, but I’d say for the most part our students come to school focused on their education. There are times when they have special financial needs and we have to be really cognoscente of that and make sure that finances or money are not an issue.