New school year means new principals for dozens of TPS sites

When classes start Tuesday at Burroughs Elementary and the rest of Tulsa Public Schools, Tisdale will be one of a handful of principals across the entire district who will be in the same building they were a decade ago.

“I cannot leave,” said Tisdale, who was a teacher at the north Tulsa elementary school before stepping into a leadership role in 2012. “I enjoy what I do. Every morning is a new adventure — it’s kind of like being in the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts. I love, love, love what I do. Every morning I come in and I’m inspired to continue the work. When I leave in the afternoons, I’m dragging out.”

That joy is shared by one of Tisdale’s fellow long-term principals. Across town, Janice Thoumire has been the principal at Dolores Huerta Elementary School since 2013.

A former reading specialist and instructional coach who has been with TPS since 1989, Thoumire said being in the same building for so long has allowed her to build relationships with families, community members and staff to the point that she is able to be proactive rather than reactive when addressing unexpected situations.

“After I’d been here maybe three or four years, the students realized, ‘Oh, this is how she handles things,’” she said, noting that her school has gone more than three years without suspending a student. “And the parents realized, ‘OK, this is how she communicates with us and with them.’”

Burroughs, 1924 N. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., and Dolores Huerta, 10620 E. 27th St., are among a slim majority of TPS sites this calendar year, as more than 30 of the district’s 72 schools have changed principals at least once since Jan. 1. That figure does not include the district’s five authorized charter schools.

Among the schools that are starting classes Tuesday with a new principal are Clinton West, Hawthorne, MacArthur, Kendall-Whittier, Mayo Demonstration, McClure, Robertson and Springdale elementary schools; Carver, Memorial, Monroe and Thoreau middle schools; Hale and McLain high schools; Tulsa Virtual Academy; and four campuses that house both a middle and high school — Edison, North Star Academy, Tulsa Met and Webster.

Additionally, during the spring semester, nine campuses changed principals: Council Oak, Hoover, Kerr and McClure elementary schools; East Central and Hale middle schools; Memorial High School; and two alternative schools — North Star Academy and TRAICE Academy.

Those lists do not include campuses where an acting principal was moved to interim status or an interim principal became principal. The acting designation is applied to a campus leader who has been in that role for less than a year, while the interim tag is applied to a principal who is in the person’s first year at a specific campus.

Rob Kaiser and Elton Sykes are among the principals who switched schools for the 2024-25 school year. Kaiser moved to McLain High School, 4929 N. Peoria Ave., from its feeder middle school, Monroe Demonstration Academy, 2010 E. 48th St. North, while Sykes moved from Carver Middle School, 624 E. Oklahoma Place, to Hale High School, 6960 E. 21st St.

Both are walking into schools that had chronic absenteeism rates of more than 80% in 2023-24 and are on the Most Rigorous Intervention list, a federal designation for schools that scored in the bottom 5% of all state report card indicators.

Although Kaiser has already worked with many of McLain’s current students in his previous position, there was still a learning curve over the summer.

“We’ve got an amazing counseling staff, but working on scheduling, learning about graduation credits and then learning about the multiple opportunities that exist at McLain currently, and then also working to strengthen some of those programs, such as Tulsa Tech being on campus and Tulsa Community College being on campus, has been a big learning experience for me,” Kaiser said.

“The biggest learning experience for me is just seeing how it all works and how different people and different teams are operating here at McLain and then just trying to continue to build and strengthen that work.”

Meanwhile, Sykes has been trying to build relationships with both the staff at Hale High School and the principals at nearby MacArthur Elementary School and Hale Middle School, which sit on the same city block as his new building.

Coming from an application-based magnet school, he has also been reaching out to the neighborhoods within Hale’s attendance area in an effort to improve the school’s public perception.

“One of the challenges is changing the mindset to one of, ‘Hey, you can come to Hale High School and have a great four-year experience,’” Sykes said. “Some people may view it as instead of, ‘I want to go to Nathan Hale,’ it’s, ‘I have to go to Nathan Hale because I wasn’t accepted into any other program.’ That’s something in the culture that we have to change.”

Meanwhile, back at Burroughs, Tisdale wove her way through the crowd Friday afternoon at Meet the Teacher Night, directing families toward check-in tables, chatting with community partners set up in the school’s gymnasium and hugging returning students — and in some cases, their adults who were her former students.

Those relationships and trust built over the years at Burroughs have been invaluable, she said.

“The trust that’s established, I carry that on a delicate pillow because I don’t ever want to betray or lose one’s trust,” she said. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

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