The Principal Who Wrote the Book on Being a Dad

If you graduated from Magnolia High School anytime between 2002 and 2016, Jeff Springer was your principal. Fourteen years is a long run in one building — long enough to learn the names, the families, the kids who needed a second chance and the ones who needed a push. He came up the way a lot of Texas administrators do, through the gym and the field house: a head football coach and an eleven-year classroom teacher before he ever sat in the principal's office. In 2013, the Texas Association of Secondary School Principals named him the State Principal of the Year. In a profession where the wins are quiet and the losses are loud, that's about as loud as the wins get.

At a glance

Led

Principal, Magnolia High School, 2002–2016

Honored

2013 Texas (TASSP) State Principal of the Year

Built

Founder of Suit Up Ministries; men's ministry at Wildwood UMC on FM 1488

Wrote

#DadPrep: Preparation for Legacy — a 52-week devotional for fathers

From the front office to the fellowship hall.

A lot of principals retire and take up golf. Springer took up a second calling. He had spent a career watching what happens to kids — which ones thrived and which ones struggled — and he'd noticed a pattern that no school program could fix from the outside. The difference, again and again, traced back to whether a kid had an engaged father at home. So he went after the fathers. He founded Suit Up Ministries, a nonprofit built around equipping men, and for a stretch served as the Minister of Men at Wildwood United Methodist Church on FM 1488 — the mid-sized church near Bear Branch Elementary that anchors this issue's tour of the corridor's congregations.

His framing is a coach's framing, which is to say it fits on a whiteboard. The job is to be a D.A.D. — Daily, Active, Devoted. The ministry's line is "Equipping Men for Victory." For more than 15 years he's run a men's weekend retreat called Camp Caleb, plus father-son events and Walk to Emmaus weekends. It is, more or less, the same work he did as a principal — getting people to show up, do the hard thing, and stick with it — pointed at a different field.

The book.

All of that became a book. #DadPrep: Preparation for Legacy is a 52-week devotional — one lesson a week for a year — built for fathers wherever they happen to be in the work, from the brand-new and overwhelmed to the grandfather doing it for the second time around. The title is the whole thesis. You prep for a game, a test, a season. Springer's argument is that the most important thing most men will ever do gets the least preparation, and that it's never too late to start. A year of small, weekly lessons is his answer — the patient, repeatable approach of a man who spent three decades teaching teenagers that the boring fundamentals are the ones that win.

Why he's a Hometown Hero.

Magnolia is full of people who gave the schools their best working years and then quietly kept going. Springer is one of them, with a paper trail: a principal the state singled out, a coach who never really stopped coaching, and an author who turned a career's worth of watching kids into a manual for the parents raising them. The corridor in this issue is changing fast, and a lot of what gets built on it is brand new. What a town can't build overnight is a man who spent 14 years learning its kids by name and then wrote down what he learned. That's worth putting on the record.

Editor's note: A positive Hometown Heroes profile — a celebration of a Magnolia neighbor, not a paid placement and not a review. Details come from Dr. Springer's published biography and his ministry's own materials; we did not accept payment and the subject had no review rights.