Every morning, Associate Principal John Mark Edwards greets every student with a fist bump and words of motivation as they cross the street, a daily tradition that’s become more than a gesture, but a promise that every student is seen and heard.

“Lots of times, I don’t get to the crosswalk until 8:25,” Edwards said. “I always feel guilty about the students I didn’t say ‘good morning’ to.”

Edwards started giving daily fist bumps when he worked at Connally High School.

“Every kid getting off the bus was frowning because they were tired or they just woke up and I remember thinking, ‘You’re not setting yourself up for a successful day if you do that,’” Edwards said. “I can sit there and watch them look sad or I can do everything I can to cheer them up.”

After crosswalk duty, he spends his day responding to emails, assisting with lunch duty, pulling attendance records, college readiness reports, attending meetings with counselors, testing coordinators and IB leaders. 

“Something people probably don’t know is that me and Ms. Jones spend the week writing the MavMail that gets sent out each week,” Edwards said. “Ms. Jones writes most of it, but my favorite parts to write about are the ones where I’m recognizing students for their accomplishments.”

Edwards knew he wanted to be a teacher because of the relationship he had with his soccer coach and one of his teachers during his senior year.

“That teacher had a really awesome way of building relationships with students and conveying the material in a way that made me want to learn more,” Edwards said. “Those types of teachers were rare, and I wanted to be a teacher myself so I could make a difference in my students’ lives like they did.”

Edwards initially started college as a history major at University of Mary Hardin-Baylor with the intention of becoming a social studies teacher and soccer coach.

“I was good at history in high school and it felt like I wasn’t learning anything new in my classes, which made them really boring,” Edwards said. “I took a sociology elective which served as a new way of thinking that had never been presented to me before, and it fascinated me.”

He changed his major to sociology and minor to psychology, but still wanted to be a social studies teacher, so he underwent a post-baccalaureate program that involved geography, government, economics and statistics classes.

Edwards’s first teaching job post-graduation was as a soccer coach at Fiscal High School in Dallas. He moved to Connally High School in Austin because he and his wife were in a long-distance relationship and wanted to be closer to each other.

He worked at Connally for six years before pursuing his master’s degree online through Lamar University. After that, he was an assistant principal at Northeast High School for two years, then went back to Connally as an assistant principal for another six years before getting promoted to associate principal, and ultimately moving to McNeil.  

“I took the easy way out when I was younger and settled for lower grades knowing that if I put in a little more effort I could’ve been making A’s,” Edwards said. “If I could tell my younger self one thing, it’d be ‘hey, you’re saving yourself time now, but you’re just making things harder for yourself as an adult’ and ‘if you give everything you’ve got now, you’ll have it easier later on in life.’

Edwards believes the biggest misconception about principals is that they enjoy disciplining students, and that is all that they do. 

“It’s never fun disciplining students, but it’s also important to acknowledge that every rule in place is with the intention of making this the best campus possible for helping students be happy, successful and safe,” Edwards said. “I think that misconception still exists today, but I try my hardest to get to know the students, which hopefully leads them to know that’s not true.”

The school faced a devastating loss of funding for the 24-25 school year that’s impacted its ability to provide essential learning materials for students.

“If I could change one thing about the education system, it’d be the way school districts are funded,” Edwards said. “Schools receive funding based on average daily attendance, which means the school loses money for each student that’s absent. The truth is that we’re not going to stop working to meet the needs of those students, whether that’s emailing them or working with them before and after school. We should be funded at a higher rate per student anyway, because our students deserve for us to provide them with more opportunities.”

That mindset goes beyond school, it’s how Edwards approaches life as a whole and fuels his biggest goal in life.

“When we do testing and teachers have to give up their conference times to support students, I always try my best to do it in a way that divides the load evenly and makes every teacher feel supported, and I’d say that’s a reflection of my philosophy,” Edwards said. “I’ve never figured out a way to make everyone happy and until I do, I’m gonna keep trying.”