Jazzman Peaden to lead Liberty Elementary
Posted on 08/05/2020
Principal Jazzman Peaden(SPS) -- There are roughly 46 billion text messages sent every two days worldwide. Two of those were important in finding the next principal of Liberty Elementary STEM Academy.

Jazzman Peaden will take over in 2020, following the retirement of former principal Tom Walsh at the end of last year.

“I’m super excited to be here,” said Principal Peaden, who comes to Liberty from Jenks Public Schools where she served as principal of Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades for five years.

Peaden may not have made it here had it not been for the familiar dings of incoming text messages. She said she received a text one night to go to Sapulpa to get ice cream. She responded about the distance and, “They were like, ‘It’s eight miles from here.”

The next day, she received a message from a former teacher about the Liberty opening and Peaden knew right away what she needed to do.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I can totally, I can see myself doing eight miles. Sapulpa, that sounds awesome.’ I looked into it and it just seemed like an amazing town, kind of like where I grew up,” she said. “So, I interviewed and here I am.”

But, before we get to "here," we need to go back.

After living in Nashville, Tenn. until fourth grade, Peaden moved to northeast Oklahoma and graduated from Oologah High School. Following high school, she attended and graduated from Oklahoma State University. She began her teaching career in Broken Arrow before moving on to Owasso Public Schools.

After Owasso, Peaden took a position with the Oklahoma State Department of Education for two years.

“I was a Reach Coach there so I was kind of a liaison to Jenks, Union, Owasso, and Claremore.”

Peaden’s responsibility was to know the ins and outs of the Reading Sufficiency Act including the legislation behind it, compliance with it, and training of teachers on how to implement it.

“That training piece. Reading is so important especially in those elementary foundational pieces. To see how to actually lay out all of the interventions and how gaps can be filled,” she said. “It totally transformed the whole way that I look at reading. I feel like it gave me so much to bring and to help schools or a school. I just feel like it really did empower me.”

Liberty students and staff will be the beneficiaries of that empowerment. Peaden said her three goals for this year are to build relationships, focus on STEM, and of course, to build really solid readers.

“I’m hopeful that if we dig really deep we can find those deficient areas and we can know exactly what to do to fix that.”

As the school year approaches, Peaden is ready to start working on those goals and building her new work home. And as she tells it, there’s no place she would rather be.

“When I looked at it and really started researching this school, I just kind of got chills. I was like this is the place I need to be. I can’t describe the feeling in my interview. It just felt like home.”

Learn more about Jazzman including the story behind her name by watching the video below.