Profile: Principal Ralph Plagman stays connected to students

CEDAR RAPIDS — Most days around 11:15 a.m., Ralph Plagman heads to the Washington High School cafeteria.

But Plagman, the school's 35-year principal, isn't there to supervise students or impose discipline.

For the first 15 minutes of each 30-minute lunch period, he stands behind a cash register, helping students as they check through the lunch line.

The routine helps Plagman get to know Washington students, he said. The school had 1,364 students last school year.

When a student buys lunch, her or his name comes up on the computer screen above the register. And chatting with high-schoolers in the lunch line can lead to other connections — a student's older sibling previously might have attended the school, or he could wish a student athlete who's wearing her or his team's jersey on game day good luck.

It's those relationships with students that motivate Plagman, he said.

In a career spanning nearly half a century, Plagman has worked in three Cedar Rapids high schools.

His first teaching job was in a social studies classroom at Kennedy High when it opened in 1967. In 1974, he helped start Metro High, the Cedar Rapids Community School District's alternative high school.

And in 1981, he took over as principal of Washington.

Plagman now is in his 35th year at Washington and his 49th year in Cedar Rapids schools. He's on his ninth superintendent, and he is the district's longest-serving current full-time employee.

A lot has changed over that time, Plagman said. He can remember when two Washington teachers bought the school's first Hewlett-Packard computers in 1981.

What hasn't changed, he said, is the importance of building bonds with students — especially 'connection to kids that are somewhat disconnected to school.'

Plagman said he loved that part of working at Metro, where many students had struggled in school. The socioeconomic and racial diversity of Washington's student population and the surrounding neighborhood was part of what drew him here, he said.

'It's very important that we make a statement that we're everybody's high school,' Plagman said.

After almost five decades, Plagman said he has no plans to retire. When he gets up in the morning, he said, he still would rather go to the school than stay at home.

'I doubt this will be my last year, I really doubt that,' Plagman said.

'I just love working with adolescents,' he said. 'That's why I continue to do this long after I could have retired.'