Meet Rodney Nelson: a local principal whose legacy is still felt

Story By Alex Zietlow

Meet Rodney Nelson: a small-town boy and a retired high school principal whose legacy remains in an ever-growing Cary, N.C., community.

CARY — If there would ever be an opportune time to do this, Rodney Nelson thought, this would be it.

It was a Friday night in early March. The Panther Creek men’s and women’s basketball teams were scheduled to play Green Hope — which were always the biggest games of the year for both programs, by virtue of the intensity-by-proximity rivalry that dates back to the beginning of Nelson’s tenure as high school principal, when he opened Panther Creek in 2006.

Nelson had been invited to the game several times in the years since he retired in 2014. And he’d even gone before. But whenever he goes now, it’s not the same as when he ran the place: Former students of his are long gone. And their parents, some of whom Nelson remembers where they sat for each game, have left with them.

Tonight is different though, Nelson rationalized. Tonight, at halftime of the game, Isaiah Johnson — a former Catamount and a recently-signed safety for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — is going to have his high school football jersey retired. It’s the school’s first ceremony of the kind. And Nelson is always there for his school’s firsts.

Plus, Nelson knew Johnson. Well, at least, he knew young Johnson — the ninth grader whose mother drove him back to Panther Creek’s campus on a Saturday morning to look for his church pants after he lost them the evening before. Nelson remembered having to pull out all the bleachers in the school’s gym that afternoon, chuckling while the young athlete scanned each row of seats for his pants to no avail. “So I had to walk the boy on the walk of shame back to his mom’s car in front of the school,” Nelson said, laughing. “And before we got out of the building, he was like, ‘Will you tell her we can’t find them?’”

Nelson went to the pair of rivalry games. He leaned on the same wall near the gym’s entryway, the same way he did years ago. Nelson said faculty and former students came up to him to shake his hand. He caught up with a few people in particular, including Johnson, with whom he talked for most of the first half. “I did a lot of visiting,” Nelson said. “I actually hardly watched any of the game.”

To the students that approached him and caught up with him that Friday night, Nelson was a high school principal: a job that even the most exceptional individuals find demanding. They knew him as the voice that came over the intercom each morning — his disarming Southern drawl personalizing the man who had such high expectations.

To the former staff at Panther Creek, Nelson was a visionary: valuing input without compromising his vision for what his school could be.

Most of all, though: to anyone who’s ever known Nelson, this was his school.

And the story of where Nelson came from, what he’s accomplished, and how he built Panther Creek helps paint the picture of the legacy he left on his community.

***

Nelson was an extension of Panther Creek — just as the school was an extension of him. In many ways, because of this, Nelson had a direct hand in shaping a growing community in Cary, N.C.

Today, Panther Creek has a 97 percent average graduation rate and ranks sixth among North Carolina’s best high schools, according to Niche.com. Its population is emblematic of an overgrown Cary community, one that has added over 70,000 people since 2000. Panther Creek now has five trailer units to make room for its nearly 2,800 students.

“The school helped to create a community out there where growth was so quick,” Nelson said, “where houses were popping up nonstop all around us.”

Nelson said his love of school, in general, started in kindergarten, when his family lived in Weldon in rural northeastern North Carolina. Nelson’s parents grew up in Northampton County, N.C., themselves — in a town with no stoplight and no more than three businesses on the town’s main street. Nelson’s father, Gene, worked for the town’s power company for 48 years. Dorothy had Rodney, her first of three children, when she was 18 years old.

Even though he grew up modestly, Nelson’s parents devoted a lot of their income to sending him and his brothers to private school in Halifax County, the next county over. To make extra money, Nelson drove a school bus beginning when he was a junior in high school. He also worked at a department store through high school, which piled on to his involved, busy lifestyle: he played on his school’s basketball team and, his senior year, he was his high school’s student body president.

“When I’ve told some people that, they’re like, ‘Would you ever have imagined a kid growing up in that kind of town and going to a high school with 29 in the graduating class, and you’d be the principal of a school with almost 3,000 kids?’” Nelson said with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘No.’

“One of the things that happened through time, I found, was that people would assume that I had a doctorate, and they would assume that I grew up in a well-to-do, rich family. Ain’t that funny — how people make judgments just because you’re the principal of a large high school in Cary? Or that you were [assistant] superintendent in Durham? (People think) that you grew up with a silver spoon.”

Nelson was the first of his family to go to college. He entered Campbell University thinking he’d leave as a minister. He transferred to a smaller school closer to home — Atlantic Christian College — after his first year. And that’s where he changed his major to English.

From there, his teaching career took off: Nelson jumped around from school to school, position to position. He was an English teacher right out of college, a guidance counselor at his old high school, and then later became a principal for a tiny school near where Fuquay-Varina, N.C., is today. He’d later become the principal of Jordan High School in Durham, and he won Durham’s Principal of the Year and was a finalist for State Principal of the Year in 2003.

“He’s just so talented as a leader,” said L.J. Hepp, an athletic director under Nelson at Panther Creek. “Very process-oriented, strategic. He wouldn’t want to be reactionary to anything. He wanted a plan.”

In 2003, Nelson was charged with reorganizing the human resources department of the Durham Public Schools System. While on the job, though, he’d missed working in a school, and when he heard rumblings about a new school opening off of McCrimmon Parkway, he was interested.

One day, when meeting with his boss at the time, Dr. Ann Denlinger, Nelson said he wanted to be Panther Creek’s opening principal. Nelson said she asked him why he wanted the position out of curiosity, and then, without hesitation, picked up the phone and made a call to someone she thought could be of service to Nelson: “The principal of Panther Creek is seated in my office right now,” she told the other end of the line.

And, as Nelson would come to find out weeks later, he was.

***

Fast forward to the end of his tenure at Panther Creek, and Nelson had built the school he always wanted to build.

“So when Panther Creek opened, it had students come from four different municipalities,” Hepp said. Students with Apex, Raleigh, Morrisville and Cary addresses all came to Panther Creek. “So how do you kind of merge them into one community? … I think what brought a lot of that together was the collective drive for excellence and the pride in the school.”

He installed SMART lunch into the school’s routine and identity. SMART lunch is a reimagined period where students have an hour’s time for lunch but are encouraged to eat for half of it and meet with faculty for the other half of it. The school still operates under this system today.

Gail Barkes, the science department head when Panther Creek opened, remembered the first time he introduced the idea of SMART lunch, in a staff meeting the school’s first year.

“That’s what I mean by him being a visionary,” said Gail Barkes, the science department head when the Panther Creek opened. “He didn’t just jump in and make everybody do it. He gave us an article as department leaders to read. And then we went back to the team and got input and it was a whole scaffolding.”

In his final semester before retirement, the graduation rate in his school was among the best in the state. He’d hired a staff that valued equity and unity: “One of the things I was very committed to when we opened was not to allow teachers to only teach honors,” Nelson said. “I’ve worked in schools where you have the faculty meeting, and on one side of the room, the people that taught honors sat, and literally on the other side, there were the teachers that taught the academic kids. And you had a school of ‘have’ and ‘have-nots.’ And if the faculty acted that way, you could rest assured the student body, over the years, acted that way.”

But much of his legacy was relationship-based. From time to time, Nelson said he would preemptively call in students who he thought were “running with the wrong crowd” into his office to just talk to them. He’d use stories to try to push them in the right direction, mostly stories of him growing up in rural North Carolina.

“Those were the fun ones, the times I enjoyed,” Nelson said. “And then when that kid walks across the stage at graduation, you’ll remember those things.”

But there are moments when he couldn’t rectify a situation with a story.

In his tenure, he remembers having to indefinitely suspend players on the school’s basketball team that had a chance at winning a state title. He recalls having to go into crisis control when a student collapsed in a hallway. He remembers the largest highs and lows of his career occuring within a week of each other: one Friday, he led the student section to storm the court after a buzzer beater, and less than a week later, he had to deal with the grief of a student’s suicide.

And how he handled those times are a part of his legacy, too.

“Any time you are a leader and you are in a high profile position like that, you’re going to do the best that you can do,” said Carla Tuttle, a teacher who was there when Panther Creek opened the school. “But I think a good thing about Mr. Nelson was he had a thick skin, and he always made the decision that he thought was right.”

***

Today, Nelson lives a bit differently.

In direct contrast with his 12-or-so-hour days as principal, Nelson, now four years out of the spotlight, spends his time following UNC basketball, participating in his group Bible study and hanging out with his dog, Chandler. Really, outside of a recent home purchase this month, Nelson has been happy keeping his schedule free.

“It’s sort of strange,” Nelson joked. “I was a planned career-person for all those career years, now I love being incredibly spontaneous.”

The school is different now, sure. Panther Creek, like all schools eventually do, has changed a bit. But the important parts of his vision he was unwilling to compromise from the beginning has remained the same: Panther Creek is still a stalwart academic institution that still connects a growing community.

At the rivalry basketball game, while Nelson stood at the entryway, he commented to a few people on the size of the crowd. He said it felt different knowing that he’s not in charge of a large event like this anymore. “I found myself almost living in that moment, of scanning the crowd,” Nelson said.

The school, in some ways, has never fully left him — which is similar to how his impact, from his tenure, may never fully leave the school.

Correction: This story initially read that in 2005 Nelson was a part of the Wake County Public School System’s human resources department. Instead, he was with Durham Public Schools. We apologize for the error.