The Pell City Board of Education recently appointed and swore a new member into their ranks. After carefully considering three candidates for the position, Tammie Williams, a 14-year resident of Pell City, was appointed to fill the unexpired term of boardmember Mike Price, who recently passed away unexpectedly.

With two children currently attending Pell City schools, Williams will offer a unique perspective and voice on the board.  

Personal life: Williams has worked for Alabama Power Company for 26 years. “I’m an engineer but I currently work in our marketing organization,” she said.

She also has two children in the Pell City school district.

“My daughter is an upcoming seventh-grader, she’ll be at Duran South, and my son is an upcoming fourth-grader, and he’ll be at Kennedy Elementary.”

Running for the board: “To be honest, I had not really given [running for the board position] a lot of thought because Mike Price was my neighbor and my friend, and his death was so unexpected and we were just all still grieving. I hadn’t really thought about his vacant position.

But, I started getting a few phone calls from people in the community, ‘Well Tammie, have you thought about feeling the vacancy?’ Well no, I hadn’t really thought about it because I’m missing my good neighbor and good friend right now, so I said I’d give it some thought. But I started getting more and more phone calls.

I thought, ‘You know, this is something I really need to think seriously about.’ I talked it over with my family, my husband and my kids, and they were 100 percent, really 110 percent support, go for it, do it, submit your name and let’s see what happens.

The response I’ve gotten from the people in the community that had called me was that I’m a mom. I have small kids in the school system, so I would have a different perspective and they felt that it made a difference having a board member that currently has kids in the school system.”

Carrying on a legacy: “Mike and I talked a lot about the school system. Mike was always an open book, I could ask him anything about the school system. He was always so gracious to take the time out to talk with me and so, I guess from that standpoint I have a little bit of an insight from a board perspective because he was always so kind to talk to me whenever I had questions.

Although I’ve never been a school board member, I know how Mike felt about things in our school system and I understood his passion about our students and our school system so I’m just honored to be able to hopefully carry on that passion he had for our students and our teacher and our system.”

Being a team player: “One of the opportunities I look forward to is number one, working with the school board as a team. They’re a wonderful board.

When I was on the parent side, our school board always had an appearance of being a great team. They worked very well together and they’ve accomplished so many great things in the system already.

I look forward to being a part of that, to being a small part of something really big. We are a 6A school system so we’re really a big school system so just being a part of that, I look forward to the challenges and the opportunities.”

Challenges facing the board:” Our biggest challenge is funding. Funding is always an issue. To my understanding, this year we’re losing the federal stimulus money that we enjoyed over the last couple of years so of course proration is staring us in the face yet again so being able to find ways.

I look at challenges as opportunities too, because may be we can find opportunities to do something different than what we’ve done before, because we have the budget restraints.

I don’t want people to always think that just because we have budget restraints that it’s gloom and doom, because it’s not. And I want to make sure we’re being transparent to our students and teachers. They should always have the tools that they need to do what they need to do to make our students productive, so the budget issue should be transparent to our teachers and students, but they never need to worry about a budget issue or proration. That needs to be what the board worries about and loses sleep about at night. That’s  always a challenge, but it should also present an opportunity to think differently, to think ‘What can we do differently and still enhance the learning experience here for our students and for our teachers?’”

Plans for the future: “All of this is so new to me, my main focus is just to make sure that our students have a clean and safe environment to go to school in and to make sure they have a curriculum that will keep them competitive once they leave our school system.

 My dream is for every child, when they leave 12th grade, when they leave our school system, that they are fully prepared academically, socially to be able to compete and to be productive citizens.

So, I want to do the things that it takes to make all that happen while having a clean and safe environment for our students to go to school.”