By Brendan Hoover
Managing Editor
Joe Holman has come full circle, and he could not be happier.
The 32-year-old product of Mustang Public Schools is now back in school doing what he loves: working with athletes.
It was a long journey that took many years. Things just kind of fell into place in a way that suggests fate, or the Hand of God.
The 1995 Mustang High School graduate entered the U.S. Air Force, just as his father had done years before him. It was a way to pay for college. It was a way to become a man.
The military eventually led him to Mustang North Middle School through the state’s Troops for Teachers program, a federal program whose primary objective is to help recruit quality teachers for schools that serve students from low-income families throughout America.
“It really worked out well,” Holman said last week. “I couldn’t ask for a better situation.”
Here is his story.
Formative years
Holman moved to Mustang from Texas in the seventh grade, after his father died suddenly. He had two older siblings, and his mother was not home often.
“I was going through the hardest part of my life, losing my dad and stuff,” he said. “My mom worked nights. I was basically by myself.”
Holman found solace in sports. In middle school, he played football, basketball and ran track at Mustang Middle School. At MHS, he starred for the Broncos on the football field and on the track.
“Sports were always kind of my outlet. I could go to the left and take the (bad) road, or I could go to my right and try to stay on the right path,” Holman said. “Fortunately, I had good friends that kept me straight … Sports was a big thing. Those were really defining years for me.”
Becoming a man
After graduation, Holman walked on the Southwestern Oklahoma State University football team in Weatherford. He played for a season, but then he ran out of money to pay for college.
Holman chose the military as one option to help pay for his education.
“My father was in the Air Force, so I figured, hey, that’s something that kind of relates to my father,” he said.
Holman served four years active duty, stationed at Beale Air Force Base in Yuba, Calif. He was trained as a medic, and he was deployed to Saudi Arabia in 1998 and Sicily in 1999.
“Awesome experience,” he said. “The military taught me how to grow up and become a man and have some responsibility, and it rewarded me with money for school and paid for an education.”
When Holman left active duty, he moved back to Oklahoma, worked as an EMT and joined the Oklahoma Air National Guard. He was assigned to the 185th Airlift Squadron, now called the 185th Air Refueling Squadron.
Holman used the G.I. Bill to go back to college, attending the University of Central Oklahoma and working towards a degree in kinesiology, or the study of the mechanics of motion with respect to human anatomy.
Before he could finish, however, war broke out in Iraq in 2003, and Holman was shipped to the Middle East. He was in theater for seven months, working again as a medic to help “keep the fliers flying.”
He treated soldiers for a variety of ailments, and he treated some war casualties, mostly international troops. “There was a bombing right outside of our base, and it was an Italian headquarters, and they sent some casualties from there to be treated,” he said. “I got a lot of good hands-on experience.”
Holman rotated back to the world in early 2004, and he went back to school. He finally earned his degree in 2006.
His family had a joke for Holman’s situation.
“They would say, ‘usually people that have been in school that long are called doctors,’” he said.
Troops to Teachers
After he graduated college, Holman worked as a health educator at the Broadway Clinic in Oklahoma City, and he also worked as an EMT while attending drill on the weekends and summers.
He heard about a program that helped people with military experience to become teachers.
Troops to Teachers was established in 1994 as a Department of Defense Program. It is funded in Oklahoma by the state board of education and administered by the DoD. The program languished in the late 1990s until the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 provided additional funding for the program.
Shelby Satterfield is the director of the Oklahoma’s Troops for Teachers program. He said the program has helped 259 Oklahoma soldiers and 11,000 soldiers nationwide become teachers.
“It’s a fantastic program. The school administrators that I have dealt with, they call and ask me if I have any troops for positions they have, because they make great teachers,” Satterfield said Friday. “They’ve got a lot of life skills. They have great leadership skills, and they show up on Monday.”
Soldiers with at least six years of military experience and a college degree are eligible to participate. They have to commit to teaching for at least three years, and they are eligible to receive a $5,000 stipend to help them pass teacher certification exams.
Teachers who go on to work at Title 1 schools – which have disadvantaged or special needs students – can receive a $10,000 bonus after three years.
“We’re doing a great job. We stay longer in the classroom. We put more minorities in the classroom. We put more males in the classroom, and they stay longer than traditional teachers,” Satterfield said.
Holman was hired at MNMS last year, partly through a connection with Nathan Burch, a teacher in his unit. Now Holman teaches physical education and health, and he coaches the Lady Colts’ seventh grade girls basketball team.
Holman also works as a defensive backs coach at Casady School in Oklahoma City.
“It was a no-brainer, because I had nothing to lose,” Holman said of the program. “Financially, it wasn’t going to be anything out of my pocket, so why not?”
Holman credits his former teacher and now MMS assistant principal Jody McElhaney as influential in his life.
Rocky Maynard, a 20-year teaching veteran at MNMS, was picked as Holman’s “mentor teacher.”
“You can’t ask for a better mentor teacher than that. He has helped me tremendously,” Holman said.
Holman lives in Mustang with his wife Jennifer, also a MHS grad, and their 3-year-old daughter Kloe.