Educator Spotlight: Meet Randall Sampson

This story is part of a series that celebrates outstanding teachers in our Flipgrid community. Stories by Angela Tewalt.

It’s a chilly Friday morning in the fall in Columbus, Ohio.  

For “Buckeye Nation,” this means there’s a football game tomorrow. At school, the students are wearing their scarlet and gray, the “Buckeye Battle Cry” is playing on the loudspeakers in between classes, and teacher Randall Sampson is marching down the hallway with his fists up. He chants loudly, “O-H!” 

The students bustle around him. You can hear the shuffle of their feet, their lockers slamming shut and that squealing team spirit chatter. They respond to him immediately, “I-O!”  

Randall repeats himself – this time maybe walking a little faster as he bobs through the students, cupping his mouth with his big hands, raising his chin and deepening his voice – “I said, ‘O-H!’ ” 

“I-O!” They cheer back. This goes on for at least a minute more, until each student retreats to their next class with a big smile on their face. Randall’s smiling, too.  

College football means a lot to families in O-H-I-O, but for Randall, those Friday mornings aren’t about the chants or a fight song or what you wear to school. It’s about the experience for the kids.  

“Every day’s not going to be peachy,” says Randall, who’s been in education for 20 years. “But at the end of the day, these kids aren’t going to come back to talk about the Pythagorean theorem lessons they learned. Their best memories are going to be about the people who loved them.  

“So tell me, what do you truly believe in? Your content? Or your culture?” 

Randall was raised in Pretoria, South Africa, where he spent his days around family dinners, going to church and playing with his cousins.  

“Everybody has a life story and a pathway they follow, and, for me, those experiences were very rich,” Randall says. “I had family. I had people. We’re all a tight-knit community, and we played like kids do. Regardless of how difficult any situation might have been, we had that human connection, and those positive experiences far, far outweigh the negative.”  

At the age of 8, Randall and his family immigrated to the United States, where his mother would work as a nurse in Ohio. He remembers flying into New York City, when he awoke to the pilot on the speaker, “Ladies and gentlemen, look out to your left window. There’s New York City.” 

“It was like a storybook,” Randall recalls. “I woke up, I looked out, and you could see the Statue of Liberty. I got out of that plane as a kid and I said to myself, ‘I’m here. Let’s go. Let’s make it happen.’ ” 

Years later, the stars are still in his eyes, and his ambition fires more than ever. Randall is the kind of educator and the kind of human that changes people.  

For years, he worked both as a teacher and as an administrator for K-12 in the Columbus school districts. Randall was the one who knew everything about the kids, asking about families and initiating conversations in the hallway. He would sit with the students during in-school suspension, bring them a slice of pizza and not let them leave until they felt loved, cared for and good about themselves, no matter what. 

He would pass around a WWE wrestling belt as a reminder that all students are capable of success, achievement and support, and he was the teacher who showed the teachers what it meant to respect others, merely by being himself.  

“You got to be the person who takes some kind of action,” Randall assures. “So that’s what I do.”