Dr. Elvis Epps did not set out to become an educator. He joined the US Navy in 1982, traveled to Singapore, Japan, the Caribbean, the Persian Gulf, and beyond, and eventually left the service when he recognized that a military lifestyle and a growing family could not coexist on his terms. His entry into education came at his wife's suggestion. He filled out applications, a school called back, and what followed was a thirty-year career spanning classroom teaching, assistant principal roles, and nearly two decades as a school administrator. That unplanned beginning, he says, turned out to be a calling. Before education, the Navy gave Epps something his hometown of Jackson, Mississippi had not. Growing up in what he describes as a third-rate education system for African American men in the seventies, no guidance counselor ever spoke to him about college. He reached higher education on the strength of nine athletic scholarship offers in track and field, plus a music scholarship and a basketball offer. The exposure he gained through military service, meeting people across continents and economic circumstances, shaped the leader he would become decades later in a Palm Beach County high school. A turnaround built on accountability and trust In February 2017, the Palm Beach County Schools superintendent called Epps into his office and asked him to take over a struggling high school on an interim basis. The school carried a reputation rooted in events from two decades earlier, and community members still associated it with gang activity long after conditions had changed. Epps arrived to a graduation rate sitting at 78 percent and a campus where, by his own account, some staff did not share a vision centered on loving students first. He moved quickly, restructuring personnel, retraining teachers, and tracking attendance with enough precision to discover that students who had moved out of state months earlier were still on rosters inflating absentee figures. The results accumulated steadily. By his final years leading the school, the graduation rate had climbed past 90 percent, peaking at 95.6 percent. The Hispanic student graduation rate, a group he describes as largely first-year learners to American schools, rose from roughly 46 percent to approximately 88 percent and continued climbing after he left. Teacher absenteeism fell from 8 percent to 1.8 percent. Epps is direct about what drove those numbers: "I am the protector of their instructional time. It means nothing interferes with your instructional time." That principle guided every decision, from removing disruptive students to quietly brokering transfers for teachers who were, in his words, good people in the wrong environment, placing them with principals whose school populations would be a better fit rather than simply letting those teachers go. The team behind the numbers Epps is consistent on one point: the outcomes belonged to a team. He points to his school secretary, Ms. Spooner, a bilingual staff member he recruited from the student services office after watching her interact with students without ever rushing them away. She became an informal translator, a keeper of institutional memory from her earlier years at a feeder elementary school, and a quiet logistical anchor who made sure, via a code phrase about a package on his desk, that a principal who never slowed down still managed to eat lunch. He also credits assistant principal Tracy Bailey, who pulled struggling students into her office, pulled up their test scores, and told them directly that she would see them to graduation, and Alicia Taylor, a mathematics leader who managed the master schedule with precision and whose department never required his intervention. A former student summed up the arc of the turnaround in a chance encounter at church two months before the podcast conversation. The student told Epps plainly: "We didn't like you when you came. We were doing our own thing, and you came in and brought some order. We didn't get it at first. But once the school shifted, turned around, all of us start saying, now we see. This is where he's taking us." That shift in student perception, from resistance to buy-in, reflected a deliberate rebranding effort. Epps consistently told staff and students that people from across the country would come to see what they were building. When celebrity chef Guy Fieri visited the campus, spoke to students in the auditorium about his own career beginnings, and presented the culinary department with a $20,000 check, it validated a promise Epps had made repeatedly to a community that had reason to be skeptical. Since retiring from school administration four years ago, Epps has continued working in leadership training and development, serving government agencies, private and public organizations, and nonprofit entities. The through line from Navy recruit to school turnaround specialist to leadership consultant is less a straight path than a series of orders accepted and acted on. His framework has not changed much: identify the right people, give them room to lead, hold the line on what matters, and, as he puts it, drop positivity into their buckets before they run dry.
