Brandenburg retiring after 20 years

Longtime Alachua Elementary School Principal Jim Brandenburg has announced he is retiring from the school he served for over 20 years. Brandenburg says the hardest part of retirement will be what he is going to miss, such as not being at school on special days.  One of those special days was the annual Veteran’s Day ceremony held at the school each November in honor of local military veterans.

The man who has led Alachua Elementary School for the last two decades is finally hanging up his hat.  Jim Brandenburg, the longtime principal at the Elementary school, said the big decision came only in the last few weeks.  His official retirement will come before the start of the new school year.

“I always thought I would be ready to retire when I didn’t like my job anymore, but I didn’t see that happening,” he said.

The idea of retiring wasn’t a serious consideration until recently when he was visiting with his father-in-law who told Brandenburg of how he came to retire.

“He had a bout with cancer, which he subsequently beat, but at that time, he retired and decided he was going to live every day and enjoy every day…he’s been doing that for 20 some years now,” Brandenburg said.

That conversation apparently sparked a series of discussions with his family members and pushed him to contemplate what he wanted to do with the next third of his life.

“We lamented how hard it was to get together, how complicated it was because of our schedules,” he said of visiting with his siblings.  “I figure none of us are getting any younger, and we’re in a position that I could retire.”

When he approached Alachua County School Superintendent Dan Boyd about retiring, Brandenburg said his response was, “If you wait until you don’t like work anymore, you’ve really stayed too long.”

“I figure I’ll go out on top.  I have a lot of good memories and hopefully other people will too,” he said.

Brandenburg won’t be far away.  In fact, the soon-to-be retired principal isn’t leaving Alachua and hopes retirement will allow him to devote more time to the handful of charities in which he’s involved.

“I’ve got plenty to keep me busy,” he said.

The timing seems right for Brandenburg, whose 23-year-old son, Bud, will soon be graduating from the University of Florida.  The extra time will also allow extra time for him and his wife, Mary, to travel a bit more and visit with family.

Among the organizations he volunteers with are the Alachua Chamber of Commerce, Stop Children’s Cancer and Rebuilding Together of North Central Florida.  All have projects he wants to spend more time on, but can’t with the 50 to 60 hours he puts in as a principal.  “It seems like there’s never enough time to do things as much as I want or the way that I want.”

He said he’s excited about helping with the Alachua Chamber of Commerce’s Welcome Center, a project still in the works, but nearing reality.

Although Brandenburg is a board member of Rebuilding Together of North Central Florida, he’s not as involved as he would like to be.  He hopes to do more hands-on work, especially with the organization’s home projects.

And they could probably use his skills.  Brandenburg is handy, known by many in the area as craftsman when it comes to carpentry and his woodwork.

About Brandenburg

Born in Battle Creek, Michigan, Brandenburg remembers moving to Fort Lauderdale when he was in the third grade.

After graduating from high school, he followed his two older brothers up to the University of Florida.

“I had no desire to go back to South Florida,” he said.  “It had changed a lot over the years from the 50s to the early 70s.”

When he graduated from the University of Florida in the mid-1970s, Brandenburg took up his first teaching job at Rawlings Elementary, where he taught fifth and sixth graders.  It was there that Brandenburg met Mary, his wife-to-be in 1976.  He spent a few years at Fort Clarke Middle School where he said he enjoyed teaching a variety of classes including Language Arts, Social Studies and even Latin.

“I remember in the early years, to make a little extra money over the summer, I would take jobs doing cabinetry work,” Brandenburg said.  But soon, those summers off would end.

He was called to work in the district office as a subject area coordinator, working with special education and gifted programs in the elementary curriculum.  In the early 1990s, a recession of sorts called Brandenburg back to the classroom, this time at Loften High School where he taught in the Drop Out Prevention program.

After about a year in the classroom, Brandenburg said he got a call from Interim Superintendent and friend, Dr. Linda Eldridge, instructing him that he was going to be going into a Principal in Training program at Alachua Elementary.

At the time, Brandenburg said he wasn’t sure he was interested in the program because he was enjoying teaching.  Adamant however, Eldridge responded to him saying, “Well, this is where you’re going to go next week,” he recalled.

Today, Brandenburg is thankful for her insistence.  “That ended up being a really good opportunity,” he said.

When he started in the training program at Alachua Elementary, Brandenburg didn’t know he would spend the rest of his career there.  He was supposed to spend one semester in Alachua and then switch to another school.

A monkey wrench was thrown into those plans when Dr. Christine Hirsch, who was the principal at that time, required back surgery.  The injury took her out of work for months and in the interest of stability at the school, Brandenburg was kept on for an additional semester.

Around the same time, the addition of Irby Elementary School was underway and Hirsch became the principal there, leaving an opening at Alachua Elementary.  Naturally, Brandenburg, having already filled the role of an assistant principal, stepped right in to lead the school.  He became the school’s principal in 1992.

The future

Exactly who is going to lead Alachua Elementary in the upcoming year and years ahead is still unknown.

“It was a hard thing to tell the faculty and staff that I was retiring,” Brandenburg said.  “I don’t think they were expecting it and I guess I really wasn’t either.”  Still, they’ve been supportive of his decisions, he said.

Brandenburg said there’s some anxiety about who is going to come in and what’s going to happen at the school, especially because most of the teachers at Alachua Elementary never worked for another principal.

To quell some of those concerns and to hear them, Superintendent Dan Boyd recently met with the school staff.

“That helped them to understand that [Boyd] was going to look out for the community,” said Brandenburg.  “I have great confidence in him to pick the right person. Whoever it is, I’ll be supportive of that decision and that person.”

As a new principal steps in to take over the reins, Brandenburg believes they’ll find the school is up to snuff.

“I think the school’s in great shape.  We’ve got the best faculty in the school system and possibly the state,” he said.  “We have a very stable faculty, very low turnover and we haven’t hired anybody new this year.”

In terms of relationships with other schools in the community, the tone has been set.  Brandenburg said, “We’ve been fortunate that in the more than 20 years that I’ve been involved in this community, we’ve had good relationship with all of the principals.”

For Brandenburg, the hard part of retirement won’t be finding things to do, but not being at school on those special days.

“The first day of school was always a lot of fun for me and that’s what I’m going to miss,” he said.

“Retirement wasn’t about not working anymore, but about doing other things I really wanted to do,” said Brandenburg.

Personal Perspective:

Best Advice: Management is not all that complicated.  You hire good people and you take care of them.  If you do that, the rest is easy. – Told to Brandenburg by his father.

Hobbies: Woodworking, working on old cars.

Favorite places to vacation: Sanibel Island, Florida, Key West, Florida and the mountains of North Georgia and North Carolina.