TAMPA — When Travian Mitchell walked into the Tampa Bay Tech auditorium that day, he thought he was responding to a routine lighting issue.
Instead, a large crowd gave him an ovation when he walked through the door. District leaders stood on the stage. His coaches were in the audience. A cameraman had his lens trained on him.
Mitchell walked towards the stage, still confused. He saw some friends in the seats. And then, he saw his parents, Michael and Kimberly, Chattanooga residents he hadn’t seen since before spring break.
“Y’all shouldn’t be here,” he thought, before pulling his father into a hug, and making his way down the line. His wife Hayley was there, along with son Travian Jr. and other extended family and friends.
The big surprise: Mitchell, Tampa Bay Tech’s assistant principal and athletic director, is this year’s Hillsborough County Assistant Principal of the Year.
“I try to be prepared for everything,” said Mitchell, “and man, this was a surprise.”
Also surprising: Mitchell said he had no idea how much the award, which he had never given any thought to, meant.
“I do this because I love it. I don’t need the gratitude,” he said. “But when someone does recognize the amount of hard work that goes into it, it’s just an amazing feeling.”
The school district cited Mitchell’s role in improving student engagement and academic performance at TBT, which has earned an A grade for five straight years, as well as his performance after stepping in for principal Ernestine Woody when she went on maternity leave.
He describes that period as intense and hard, although he was applauded for his composure taking over the additional duties as principal and still acting as athletic director.
“I was a duck on water,” Mitchell said “It may have seemed I was extremely calm, but underneath, man, I’m paddling. I am paddling my tail off.”
Paddling, in fact, is how he helps take the edge off. If he’s not hunting, he’s fishing, taking his kayak into the Weedon Island mangroves and the causeway, intent of catching some snook, reds or trout.
“Trout makes the best tacos,” Mitchell said. “Reds fried up, are really, really good. And just the fight of the snook man. It’s always, always wonderful.”
When he wasn’t reflecting on the water, he was leaning on the team at TBT. He says he couldn’t have earned top honors without the group that Woody had assembled at the time, namely assistant principals Nicole Conte, Samantha Wallace and John White.
He says he likened the TBT crew to Voltron, the 1980s cartoon where five pilots flying five robot lions can combine to form Voltron and save the planet from intergalactic beasts.
“It was an amazing team,” Mitchell said.
A former offensive lineman who at 6-foot-5, 300 pounds looks like he could probably hold his own if the Titans ever needed an extra left tackle, Mitchell considers what he does more a “ministry” than a job.
His size, and a Barry White-like bass-baritone that teachers quip sounds like “the voice of God,” make for a commanding presence. His wife jokes about monetizing his velvet vocals, perhaps doing audio books.
Matt Caiati, a friend and assistant principal at a county charter school, said Mitchell is the total package when it comes to school administration.
“If I could pick two words or a phrase to describe him, just “servant leadership,” Caiati said. “Truly just dedicated to the profession, to the kids, to the staff. I am where I am today because of his leadership, his ability to not only mentor the youth, but also mentor teachers. He’s truly an inspirational person.”
Mitchell is a country boy from DeKalb County in Georgia, who grew up playing sports, fishing and hunting. His office at Tampa Bay Tech doesn’t show off any framed degrees, just a 13-point buck and Brooksville pheasant, his kind of trophies.
He played football into college at Morehouse College, where he earned a history degree, then started a security firm. But when work got too dangerous, he changed direction and enrolled at Ohio State for graduate school.
There, he helped improve recruitment and retention of African American males, who he says was a group grossly underrepresented on campus.
“African American males were outnumbered by Asian Pacific Islanders,” said Mitchell, who helped design programs and make the school more appealing for African Americans.
That experience lit the spark that led him to education.
He joined Teach for America, teaching science in Durham, North Carolina, where he helped achieve some of that district’s largest academic gains.
When his wife, Dr. Hayley Mitchell, received a post-doctoral opportunity in Hillsborough County, it was time for Mitchell to head to Florida.
“You find a woman that you can’t live without, so you move mountains,” he said.
In Florida, Mitchell took jobs both coaching and teaching at McLane Middle, Van Buren and Chamberlain High.
When it came time to make the leap into the administrative side at Hillsborough High, he said he spent his first day at one point sobbing. He didn’t know if it was because he had finally hung up his coaching whistle, or because he missed being with kids in the classroom.
Or both.
But he had honed his skills at each of his stops, taking on difficult situations and improving them, and it was time for that next step.
After COVID-19, he moved on to TBT, where he has flourished, and developed into one of the district’s most respected leaders.
Mitchell loves TBT’s hands-on learning environment as a magnet school, where one student might be rebuilding an engine while another practices a surgical procedure or assists with animal care through the school’s partnership with the Humane Society.
“Just so many things here, and everyone wants to be here, staff and students alike,” he said.
Still, he knows a principal job likely awaits him, and sooner than later.
Ideally, he wants to make an impact. He would love to help change the trajectory of another school somewhere and bring the community along with it. He wants to develop kids that go off to college, and then return to serve their community, whether it be as doctors or lawyers or auto mechanics. He wants to create the same kind of incubation chamber similar to what he says makes TBT such a special school.
“I have access to the model, and I look forward to being able to implement it somewhere else,” he says.
But he knows when he reaches up to pull that 13-point buck down off the wall to move it to another office somewhere, it won’t be easy.
“It will be a tough day,” he said. “But there will be excitement in that as well.”