University in Midway, Kentucky, graduating with a degree in education and a certification in math and English. She was offered a job immediately after graduation with Harrison County Schools in Cynthiana, Kentucky. She taught seventhand eighth-grade English. As luck would have it, during her second semester there she received a call from a woman who had been her high school guidance counselor and was now the principal at South Oldham Middle School. The principal told Orman they had an opening for an English teacher and wanted her to apply. Orman did and was hired to teach seventh- and eighthgrade English. She stayed for five years.
SCHOOL PRIDE
Orman always had a desire to find a job with JCPS.
“I felt like you could put a cardboard cutout up in front of the classroom in Oldham County and kids would still be successful,” she says. “I felt like they had a lot of what they needed, and it didn’t feel like, to me, such as the Panama Canal Zone and Atlanta, what teaching would really be.” Georgia. Once he retired, the family moved to Kentucky. She had heard a teaching position was
DR. HEATHER ORMAN SETTLING IN AS EASTERN HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL
Writer / Julie Engelhardt Photography Provided
Like so many schools across the country, Eastern High School had a rough time last year due to the pandemic. Their in-person classes shut down, students struggled with virtual learning, programs like sports and band ceased, and the seniors of the class of 2020 were not able to experience certain rites of passage such as their senior prom and an in-person graduation. Yet, a shining light emerged at the end of this very dark tunnel in the form of a new principal, Dr. Heather Orman. Although Orman never attended Eastern, she has family ties to the school and has been employed in the past at Jefferson County Public Schools ( JCPS). “My dad, my uncle and my aunt all attended Eastern,” she says. “I even have a picture in my office of my dad in the Eastern band at the inauguration for President Eisenhower. My dad played clarinet.” Orman was born in Maine, but her family traveled quite a bit due to her father being in the Marines. They lived in various places
“We settled in Pewee Valley when we came back, and I attended Oldham County High School,” she says. “I graduated in 1989 and I was in the last class before they started dividing the high school into separate schools.” Orman was an athlete in high school, playing basketball all four years. “We had a really good run of it and we went to the state tournament for three of the four years I was there,” says Orman, who is 6’2” and played center. After graduation, Orman attended Kentucky Wesleyan College on an athletic scholarship for two years, but soon made the choice to take some time off. “I needed a break because I’d played sports my whole career and it was just a lot,” she explains. “I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.” She ended up transferring to Midway 6 / MIDDLETOWN MAGAZINE / JULY 2021 / TownePost.com
available at Meyzeek Middle School so she applied for it, and was offered the job. She stayed there for 13 years.
While she was teaching, Orman continued her education and received her principal certification, at age 28, from Indiana University Southeast. At that time, she said she always felt that being a school leader wasn’t that important. “I thought, when I was a teacher, that teaching was where the meat of the work happened,” she says. When she was 40, Orman decided to take the next step and began working on her doctorate. She received a doctorate in education and social change from Bellarmine University. After receiving her doctorate, Orman began to seriously consider becoming a principal. “I started to look at the research, and just based on my own life experience I started thinking about how much leaders have impacted me, even going back to my days
