Mentoring is mantra for middle-school principal

Harry Thomas ’97 is not the kind of principal who sits in his office all day. He’s in the hallways at Fredericksburg’s Walker-Grant Middle School during class changes. He monitors students at lunch. He drops in on classes. The kids know him, and just as importantly, he knows them.

Since landing the school’s top job last summer, he’s been just as visible to teachers, instituting a mentoring program, bulking up online resources, and adding new teacher recognition programs.

Thomas’ hands-on style and passion for education can be traced to his days at Mary Washington, where he was inspired by two people: former James Farmer Multicultural Center director Forrest Parker, who steered Thomas to a post-graduate education program at James Madison University, and Tomaudrie Rudd Thomas ’96, who married him.

The son of a Richmond physician, Thomas fully expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. But that wasn’t to be.

“I discovered I had no real interest in biological science,” he said, but he was intrigued by political science – and earned his degree in that field.

At Mary Washington, he and his future wife became actively involved with the Multicultural Center, served as resident assistants for their dorms, and joined a group called College Ambassadors for Multi-Ethnic Outreach.

“We were both getting the sense that we wanted to work with students,” Thomas said.  

He started on that path as an academic advisor at George Mason University in Fairfax. But living in Fredericksburg, he found the commute too demanding. So, he switched to a job closer to home – guidance counselor, and eventually counseling director, at a Stafford County high school.

“Having worked at the college level, I knew what these high-school students needed in order to be prepared,” Thomas said.

He took that knowledge with him to Fredericksburg’s only high school, James Monroe, where he served as assistant principal for nearly three years before being offered his current position.

Thomas and his wife have two children, 10-year-old Brenea and 6-year-old Brysen.

Tomaudrie is a program manager for pretrial services in Stafford County, where she has also worked as a probation officer. Her daily duties serve as a direct admonition to Thomas to prepare middle-school students for a lifetime of achievement.

He was lucky, Harry Thomas said, to have the support of mentors growing up, both at Mary Washington and early in his career. He wants to play that same role for a bunch of sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders lucky enough to have him as their principal.

– Marjolijn Bijlefeld