Long before she became Carroll ISD’s Assistant Superintendent for Board and Community Relations, Julie Thannum was a 23-year-old journalist and editor of a daily newspaper "The Times Record News." Even in the thick of news reporting, Julie says she always loved education – especially when she was writing about it.
“My husband worked as a teacher for Eagle Mountain Saginaw,” Julie recalls. “The superintendent one day called me up and asked me to come to lunch. He asked me, ‘Have you ever heard about public information officers?’ I said ‘Yes, and you need one.’”
She didn’t realize that conversation was her interview for the job until she was offered the position afterward.
“I thought he was just asking me about what you need as the newspaper editor,” Julie chuckles. “Later he would laugh and say he hired me so I would stop writing about him and start writing for him.”
After working for Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD for seven years, Julie applied for the public information officer position at Carroll ISD in 1997. She has remained with the district ever since, overseeing Carroll ISD’s communications, marketing, open records requests and school safety 23 years and counting.
“You’ve got to be a really strong person to walk into a room and say ‘I think we’re doing this wrong,’” Julie expresses. “I tell each and every one of them that I’m going to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.”
Julie is one of five women featured on the panel for Southlake Style’s 2019 Women’s Luncheon, an afternoon where women across the metroplex will gather to learn how to balance their lives together. Julie says women need to find something just as fulfilling to themselves as community relations are to her, and they won’t know what that is until they put themselves out there.
“You have to try new things,” Julie says. “You have to figure out what it is that makes you happy and what makes you smile when you wake up.”
Want to hear more from Julie and the rest of the panel? Purchase tickets to the fourth annual Women’s Luncheon at 817Tix.com.