“Mr. Perry will forever be with us,” they scrawled in teal sidewalk chalk in front of G.W. Carver Middle School, where Phillip Perry served almost a year as principal.
Perry died Tuesday morning from COVID-19 complications. His death marks the first in McLennan County resulting from the new coronavirus. As of Thursday, McLennan County reported 48 other COVID-19 cases, including six hospitalized patients, four of whom are in critical condition, according to the Waco-McLennan County Public Health District.
Perry, 49, returned to Waco in May last year to start serving as Carver’s principal, but he was not new to town. He previously served as an assistant principal at Carver and at Waco High School before moving to Temple, where he worked as the principal of Fred W. Edwards Academy.
Some of the people Perry worked with recalled him as a servant leader who was dedicated to his students, no matter what position he served in.
Daphanie Latchison, principal of Brazos High School, spent four years at Waco High School as an assistant principal, where Perry worked as an assistant principal for two years. He was one of the first people she met on the job in 2012, which she was anxious about after teaching fifth grade in Killeen ISD for six years. But Perry took her under his wing and guided her through the transition.
“We worked side-by-side,” she said, laughing. “We were pretty much like Bonnie and Clyde.”
Latchison took the assistant principal job on faith, and Perry was there to help her whenever she had questions, even after they parted ways. In the beginning, she asked him what the biggest part of being an assistant principal was, and he told her that the most important thing was to be of service to the students, regardless of what they do.
“You always have to keep an open mind. You always have to stay positive. You’re going to hear a lot of stuff. You’re going to hear cuss words and this and that, but at the end of the day they’re looking to us for stability,” she recalled Perry telling her. “That was his philosophy and how he lived his life. He was always doing something for his students, and that’s why his students truly, truly loved him, whether it was cooking for them, buying them groceries or just being a mentor to them on the weekends.”
Latchison remembered his advice when Perry left to work in Temple in 2015 and she stayed at Waco High another year. She said Perry would spend his free time at the Dewey Recreation Center, refereeing kids he crossed paths with at school.
“He really taught me to always keep that service mindset when you are dealing with students because oftentimes we want to be so critical,” she said. “We want to crucify them for the mistakes they make, but again, we have to be that service entity to them and show them how it should be, what it should look like based on the path that we have traveled. He was there for the kids. When we get in administration, we tend to focus on the adults, but at the end of the day they’re the reason why we’re there. They’re the nucleus of our jobs, and you can never ever lose sight of the people who you serve and those are ultimately the students.”
Jeremy Jackson, a seventh grade teacher at Carver, returned to the middle school only after Perry returned to the school in May. Jackson graduated from Gordon College in Massachusetts in 2017 and then took a job at Carver. After a year, he moved to Tennyson Middle School for a year, but he went back to Carver this school year, partly because he wanted to be under Perry’s leadership.
“Mr. Perry always had a way of letting you know he had your back,” Jackson said. “For that, he will always be loved and respected, by more than just me but the community.”
Perry’s death at age 49 put Jackson’s own mortality in perspective and made him realize how important the relationships in his life are. He said it also highlights how serious COVID-19 is.
“You realize it could be anybody, and the death of Mr. Perry is really shaking up the community,” Jackson said. “It shows how indiscriminate COVID-19 is. It could be anybody anywhere. It’s not just some guy in New York. It’s not just some guy in California we’ve heard about on TV. It’s right here, and it’s real.”
— WACOTRIB