Burkett to retire after 27 years of service
By John Earp
Bobby Burkett, maintenance supervisor for the Jal Public Schools, has decided to retire this coming June. He has worked for the school district for 27 years. Prior to coming to work for the school district, Mr. Burkett worked for El Paso Natural Gas for 26 years.
He said he enjoys working. He said, “God makes people like me that loves to work. That’s all I’ve ever done; work, work, work.” Burkett says, “I’ve worked about 10 years longer than I should have. Every day when I wake up I can’t wait to get to work. Ain’t that strange? You’d think after a while you’d get burned out and you’d want to quit. I don’t want to quit. I didn’t ever want to leave a job because I wanted to leave, because I hated it. I worked for five superintendents, and I’ve felt this way through all of them. All of them were good men to work for, but this guy here [Snider] is probably one of the better ones, because we started getting the money, the tools to work with. I can honestly say we’ve got good hands here. I worry about them more than anything because I don’t know who they will replace me with. You get the wrong guy in here and you can…you got to give these people rest. We physically work, and they’ve got to have breaks, maybe 20, 30 minutes, maybe an hour, especially when we’re [working outside in the heat].”
Burkett says the time flies by working in maintenance for the district, with the many and varied maintenance jobs they are tasked with. Besides the school buildings and school grounds, the maintenance department is responsible for the teacherages (houses) the district owns, the athletic fields with their buildings, building walls in classrooms, etc. He said, “There’s a lot of stuff here we’ve got to do. We change the oil on these buses. With four people here, with me trying to handle the business part of it here, it keeps us pretty busy.”
He says his wife Judy wanted him to retire five years ago, but he didn’t want to yet. Burkett says he plans to take things easy in his retirement, doing yard work at home and taking his wife to the mall. The Burketts plan to move to Midland soon, to close to top-notch medical care should they need it. He says they have no immediate plans to travel right now.
“I told Mr. Snider I wasn’t even going to tell these hands I was even going to retire. I was going to be here one day and then gone, like people that just vanish. But I had to announce it.”