Greenville High School principal resigns

GREENVILLE – Faye Booker has seen the highs and the lows in public education.

After 28 years, 27 of them as a teacher and later principal of Greenville High School, Booker resigned effective last week to begin a business that is education-based.

“I’m ready to go on to something else,” Booker said, during an interview last week . “I walk away from this job knowing that I did no harm.”

Until the end of the year, administrators plan to restructure from within to fill the vacancy created by Booker’s resignation, according to Superintendent Steve Pound.

Even though Booker, who served as principal for the last four years, has witnessed some rocky times in education and has been the subject of criticism, she is one of its greatest supporters.

A few years ago, the school climate was at an all-time low. “Four years ago when I took this job we [the school and students] were hurting,” she said.

Booker had to contend with bullying and threats among students, as well as school vandalism.

There were students who were afraid to come to school, she recalled.

“We’ve taken a lot of steps to stop that,” she said, including holding workshops on tolerance and bullying and keeping the affirmative action officer more involved.

The handful of students responsible for the disruption either withdrew from classes or were expelled, which improved the school climate. But expulsion was a tough avenue for Booker to recommend. “If you’re truly an educator, you want to save everyone,” she said.

“You’re put in a position where you have to look at what’s best for the rest of the students,” Booker explained. If the school had an alternative education program, a proposal she made that was axed from the budget early on, those disruptive students could have been saved, she believed.

“This town has always stepped up and has always put education first,” Booker said. But as finances grow tighter, Booker said teaching approaches would have to change. “We need to distinguish ourselves as a destination and not as the end of the road,” she said, of the community. She believes that there will be more reliance on the audiovisual teaching system.

She suggested that Greenville might want to broadcast its calculus offering to other schools, which would bring revenue to the school and help other schools that are unable to offer it.

“I think there’s room for change but I think we’re slow to embrace it,” Booker said. “Part of me feels that I should continue as principal,” to be part of those changes, “but the other part says it’s time to move on.”