Gerald Perry, longtime administrator of Athens City Schools, Limestone County Schools and Rogersville High School. 

Gerald Perry may come from humble beginnings as a sharecropper, but he says his life has been wealthy with love since the very start.

His family did not have a lot of money while he was growing up. However, he had a mother (Verna) who loved him and a father (John) who taught him how to work hard and respect others.

“I grew up financially poor; we had little money. My mother could only afford to make me a couple shirts out of the fertilizer sacks to wear to school. My father was a disabled veteran,” he said. “But, I had good parents. I had a good childhood. I have no regrets about it.”

He reminisces on the land and house he grew up on, under the circumstances he was a part of.

“We had a few acres of our own. The road I lived on was graveled, and my father and an uncle built a little block house there,” he said. “When I first moved there, we lived in a little wooden house until the little block house was done. That house will be standing when your house and my (new) house has come (down).”

His wealth of love would only grow following getting married and having two daughters – Lori and Christy – who would give him four grandchildren as well.

However, his love for all people and the love he received back started long before he had children and became an administrator at multiple schools.

Perry grew up in the Tanner community, where there were divisions between the white families and the Black families. Despite this line that signified the racial tensions of the time across America, where the effects of these tensions reared its head in the South, Perry was always viewed as a friend to all races.

In order to get out of the fields, Perry took a job at the local grocery store in the Tanner community on Coleman Hill. 

“I got real lucky. We were poor, you know? We would do anything to make a nickel any way we could,” he said. “The man down the street from us – John Morris – owned a little grocery store, and he got to know me. So one day, he says ‘how would you like to work in our store on Saturdays?’ I worked there throughout high school and even my first year after (Florida College). He was really good to me and I worked hard. He would take me fishing on Saturday mornings, too. 

It was here that he worked with people of different races.

“Working in that local grocery store, what it did for me was I got to know people and got to talk to people. (Morris) got me out of the cotton field and taught me to get to know people and make relationships,” he said.

However, by the time he was 16, he had more than just one job, as he was a school bus driver for Athens Bible School, after spending part of his student life at Tanner.

“Not too many high schoolers had two jobs,” he said.

His love for the Tanner community was so great that he would come back after graduating from Florence State, after he and his college sweetheart turned wife, Brenda, made a brief stop in Jacksonville, Fla., for their first school jobs since graduating.

The two would become the Science department for Tanner High School. Gerald would teach Chemistry, Brenda would teach Biology, and they would split duties at the Junior High.

“We got to thinking that both of our families lived in North Alabama, so maybe we should put our roots down there,” he said. “One day the superintendent of Limestone County Schools calls and says ‘how would you like to come to Tanner High School and be our Science department?’ I was there about five years and Brenda was there about two, until the oldest of our two daughters was born.”

Perry has also always had a passion for basketball; it dates back to his school days. It was the mischief of a high school-aged Gerald Perry that would actually spark a love for coaching and continued love for sports.

“When I was in the 11th grade, I got to where I would sneak out at study hall. The elementary kids would be out on the outside goals playing basketball, so I would go out there and help them with their game because I got to where I loved doing it. Then, one day the principal called, took me to his office. Back then it wasn’t much of a discussion. He gave me my (discipline) for being out of place, then he says ‘since you want so bad to be out there, I am just going to assign you out there.’ So from that day on the rest of the school year, I was out there every day coaching those boys,” he said.

His love for coaching combined with his love of helping kids turned into a career in school administration that has left countless Athens-Limestone residents with fond memories of a man who truly cares.

Following his stint as a teacher at Tanner, Gerald would go on to have a decorated administration career in the Limestone County and Athens City school systems in multiple roles for multiple schools.

The first was the assistant principal role at Tanner High. Then, he would end up as the assistant principal at Athens Middle School, which is how he got into the city system where he would spend the “next 30 years or so” other than one year at Lauderdale County High School (formerly Rogersville High School).

“I was an administrator at one time or another in four of their (Athens’) schools,” he said.

His other roles at the schools included going to Athens High School after the departure of Larry McCoy, who at that time was the assistant principal of Athens High and a successful football coach. Gerald would end up being offered the job without applying for it to become the new assistant principal at the high school.

During his stint at Rogersville High School, following his time as assistant principal at Athens High, Brenda was working at Austin High School in Decatur. However, they were living in Country Club Acres in Athens, in between both of their jobs.

With children in school, and Gerald wanting his wife to keep her job at Austin, he got his old job back as the assistant principal of Athens High School after talking to superintendent Dale Weiznecker.

“I was assistant principal at Athens High School twice,” he said.

Brenda would eventually make her way over to Athens High School as well, while also teaching classes at Calhoun Community College.

However, Gerald had a dream of being principal one day. He knew he would be good at it. He knew he had the ability to love kids and teach them discipline at the same time.

He got his shot at Cowart Elementary following his second stint at Athens High. He knew going from high school kids to elementary kids would be a challenge, but Gerald did what he called a “smart thing.”

“I hired the world’s best secretary. I was an elementary principal my last 16 years, and I had one secretary in Linda Neill for all of it. They had hired her on an interim basis. I interviewed about 30 people. Others had said ‘you should consider Linda’ and long story short, I gave her the job and she was my secretary for the next 16 years.”

He also only had two music teachers in the span of his 16 years in the elementary ranks as principal.

After nine years at Cowart, he would move over to the new elementary school: Brookhill. Neill would follow him there as well to continue their productive working relationship.

One of his crowning achievements in his career was being a major factor in starting the girls sports programs at Athens Middle.

“I am at Cowart when Title IX comes along, and they knew that I liked sports. So, I started girls basketball at Athens Middle School. I coached for the first two years – 17 and 2 record the first year – so I could get the program going, then handed it over.”

However, this would not be the end of his impact on girls’ sports.

As an enthusiast of softball, he was then asked to start a girls softball team.

“We won and we won a lot,” he said. “What was funny is we would go to these tournaments in Florence and Huntsville and these places, and the other people didn’t mean it ugly, but they would go ‘oh here comes Athens, this is their first year.’ But little did they know, the girls had eight years of fast pitch softball. Then, we would win the tournament.”

His service to sports in the area even included becoming an assistant basketball coach at Athens High for a former student of his: Randy White.

He was there for seven years before he and Brenda retired early in their early 50s.

“I had been inside the four walls of a school for 47 years consecutively,” he said. “I had been in school as a student, a teacher, an administrator for 47 years.”


Perry can look back at his career knowing he was able to be loved and respected at the same time. It is tough for the de facto school disciplinarian to be loved by the students, but he found a way to be so admired that students would throw him surprise birthday parties.

According to him, both he and Brenda have had former students-turned-adults come up to them talking about the impact they have had on their lives.

Now, they can enjoy retirement and enjoy the Athens community, while also watching their grandchildren continue to grow.