Meet The Principal

By Mark Carpenter

People’s Defender

If Tim Davis was a poker player, he could thrown down quads on the table, winning with his four of a kind. Davis, the current principal at Manchester High School, is one of the few, if any, educators who has been employed in some respect at all four Adams County schools- a teacher at North Adams, a teacher and principal at Manchester and Peebles plus a stint as the principal at West Union. Safe to say he has made the rounds in the county.

Tim Davis was born in Springfield, Ohio and his family (parents, one older brother, one older sister) lived there until 1977 when they bought a farm in Highland County, which was during Davis’s freshman year at Whiteoak High School, where he eventually graduated.

“My parents taught me work ethic,” Davis explains. “I worked very young, like 10 years old, when I started mowing yards for people. My Dad and grandfather were brick and stone masons and concrete workers and I went to work for them in the summers when I was 12. I learned about hard work very early and after we moved, it was farm work. I had a list of chores every day in the summer waiting on the kitchen table and they had to be done before my Dad got home. I worked a part-time job on another farm while I was still in high school and many nights I’d get home from that farm in the evening, then have to do my chores and my homework. My parents both grew up during the Depression and my Dad was a World War II veteran and that’s how life worked, you had to work hard to achieve things.”

“I had always kind of thought about teaching as a career, pondering between Ag Education or History,” says Davis. “I worked full-time after I graduated high school to try to raise money for college but that didn’t really pan out in the beginning, so I quit college.”

Davis worked as a master sheet metal fitter in a factory for awhile and decided that he really didn’t want to pursue that his whole life and the only other option that he had if he wanted to go back to college was using the GI Bill and so it was military time for him. He spent five years on active duty (stationed in Germany for a time where he watched the Berlin Wall come down) and another stint with the National Guard (where he guarded the US Olympic Village in Atlanta in 1996) and the GI Bill paid for him to attend Shawnee State University. He graduated from Shawnee and was hired in the Ohio Valley District and also started working on his Master’s Degree the first day he started in the classroom. Believe it or not, that first assignment (in 1997) was teaching second grade at Peebles Elementary.

“I still had to work part-time while I was in college to help support the family,” said Davis. “I taught school and was a sub bus driver, sub custodian and anything else I could do. Life was a bit hectic, teaching second grade and taking classes. The next year I taught first and second grade, then moved to North Adams and taught fourth grade. An administrative position came open at West Union Elementary as the assistant principal and Davis interviewed and got that position.

“I was the assistant principal at WUES for a year and then was moved up to principal, and I stayed on that job for three years,” Davis recalls. “I was hired as the assistant principal at West Union High School under Dennis Sizemore and spent five years in that position and then moved up to high school principal at West Union through 2013, then took the head principal’s job at Peebles High School. Peebles was a bit closer to home and my kids were in school in West Union and I just found it was easier to be principal somewhere that your kids don’t go to school. I could be Dad.”

“I was at Peebles High School through 2016 and at that point I decided I wanted to explore other horizons and I took a job at Shawnee State in their College of Teacher Education where my job was field placement and supervising student teachers and working with the college in their accreditation process. I was placing students in New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, just all over the place. I stayed there for two years and started to realize that I really missed being around the kids.”

That realization led Davis back to the classroom, teaching junior high Science at Manchester while also enjoying coaching cross-country and track, and he spent four years in that position. Then an administrative position opened up at Manchester and Davis explained, “When I came to Manchester, I had no desire of going back into administration, I just wanted to teach. I was offered the administrative position and it had been such a great place to work with really good people and so I decided to try it again and this is now my third year as high school principal at Manchester and I really enjoy it.”

“This is a great community to work in- great teachers, great students and a lot of potential that we are building every day. We’ve re-aligned curriculum, improved our overall test scores, and through our work with Southern State, our students never have to leave the building and they can graduate with an Associate’s Degree. We got a grant just this year through OhioMeansJobs to institute vocational computer courses in grades 7-12 and if a student stays with that program they will graduate with a certification in coding and web design and be able to go straight into the workforce.”

“I’ve really done it all and it has been rewarding,” Davis continued. “I still get excited about getting up in the morning and going to work and I’m still nine years from retirement because I started late due to my time in the military and I’d love to spend it all here. I’m not looking to go anywhere else. This is my true calling.”

Away from the school, Davis has a rather unique hobby inherited from his father, which seems to tie in with his love of History and his military service.

“My father was an avid hunter and loved History too and historical guns and weapons from the Revolution up to the Civil War. I like to tinker with those types of guns and even build them from scratch. My mother was a patient woman as my father and I built guns on her kitchen table in the evenings. That sparked my interest and I just continued the hobby. My son and I have done historical re-enactments and I’ve built guns for other people and used some of them for hunting. Building a gun from a blank is usually about a two-month process at my pace, all done by hand.”

Between he and his wife Vonda, they have four children, his son and three stepdaughters, and are expecting their third grandchild next month. Davis and his wife also like to travel, calling the Smokies their “happy place” while also enjoying time at the beach.

“I think the community is so proud of Manchester High School,” Davis says. “They support it so much and the kids here are so resilient and hard-working, a lot of them having to go through what no child should have to go through, but they bounce right back and succeed. It’s the work ethic and they’re just good kids. This community has been through a lot but they are so close-knit and so supportive of our school system which makes it a nice place to work. We have a hard-working and dedicated staff who want to see our kids succeed.”

“My philosophy is to try and send a kid home in better shape than his parents sent him to us in the morning. Happier, a little more educated, and a little more excited. Teach them something about themselves, something that will motivate them to be better. Just send them home a little happier.”