Deciding from a young age that she wanted to be in leadership in education, Tiffany Rickman recently fulfilled that goal by being named principal at Barbara Jordan Elementary School.

Previously, she has served as an assistant principal for six years at several elementary campuses in Ector County ISD and has taught at the kindergarten and elementary levels in Odessa, Lubbock and Big Spring.

Rickman also has served as a campus curriculum facilitator and has taught kindergarten at LBJ Lubbock and Big Spring, which was where she started out. She has been with ECISD for eight years.

A Littlefield native, Rickman earned a bachelor’s degree in human development and family studies from Texas Tech University and two master’s degrees, one from Tech in elementary education and one in leadership from Lubbock Christian University.

“My leadership is more my strong point. From a young age, I always had leadership qualities. My mom was a teacher and so education runs deep in our family …,” Rickman said.

As she expected, Rickman said she has loved every minute of being in leadership.

“… I love helping teachers. I love growing. I love seeing the growth students make and then the growth teachers can make,” Rickman said.

Blackshear Principal Valerie Rivera said Rickman can be described with this quote from President John Quincy Adams (1767-1848): “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.”

Rivera said the qualities Rickman brings to the job are the ability to motivate, develop and inspire others. She said Rickman successfully implements change, is supportive, highly visible, a problem solver, empowers others and is dedicated to her work.

“I could go on and on. She is a great one,” Rivera said in an email.

About 850 students in kindergarten through fifth grade attend Jordan, but she was familiar with large campuses having been at Blackshear, which had about 800 students.

“… We live out in this community and so I really already feel invested. My husband builds out here for Betenbough (Homes) and so we have a lot we’ve invested already. … One of the points that I made is I want to continue growing Jordan and I want to continue making it … even better,” Rickman said.

One way of doing that is preserving Jordan’s family feeling and keeping parents involved with the school. The campus is also a family.

“I hope that this year we don’t have the COVID restrictions and we can have the family nights and the track and field day to bring that parent engagement and continue with the PTA program and the volunteers in the schools,” Rickman said.

She added that she keeps an open-door policy.

“If there’s ever a problem, if there’s ever an issue, come talk to me and let’s have that open communication because a lot of problems can be solved through open communication,” Rickman said.