David White retired in September 2025, after 33 years in education. He spent the last 15 of them as principal of Burgess-Peterson Academy, an elementary school in Atlanta, Georgia. By the spring of 2026 he was working in the same building again, and he came back as the handyman.
It had been a long career and a decorated one. White was once named Principal of the Year for the entire Atlanta Public Schools district. He told CBS News he left mostly to be free of the daily demands of the job.
Retirement was not what he pictured. “I thought it would be blissful and easy and joyful,” White said. “It wasn’t quite.” The open days wore thin on him. “I was just hanging out with the cat, and it was a little lonely.”
What he missed was the school community. He knew he could not be principal again, because Burgess-Peterson had already hired a new one. When a different position opened up there, he fired off his resume immediately. He told Holly Brookins, the new principal, that he meant to apply, and Brookins told CBS News what went through her head when he did.
“I said, ‘Hmm, OK, that’s interesting.’ I said, ‘Absolutely, apply.'”
He got the job. He came back as the handyman, though the title on the paperwork is site manager. He power washes bathrooms, inspects fire extinguishers and cleans gutters in a building he ran for 15 years.
White is clear about where the role sits. “Yeah, I’m one of the bottom rungs, if you look at in a hierarchical way,” he told CBS News. “It doesn’t bother me at all.”
“I still feel like I’m contributing meaningfully to a place I really care about.”
What this one shows
Most of the stories collected here are about a thing changing hands. A dress, a van, a work trailer, a seat at a ball game. This one is about a job, which is the same exchange in a different shape. A man wanted work that meant something to him. A school had work that needed doing. Between the two of them sat one conversation.
The Jobs pillar on MeetaNeed rests on the plainest version of that. Somebody has work that needs doing. Somebody else wants the work. The hard part is usually not the willingness, it is the finding. White found his own opening, and his story happened nowhere near this site, but it shows what the finding is worth once it happens.
A man who used to run the building came back as the handyman. The woman who runs it now heard what he wanted and told him to go ahead.
Where this story comes from
Originally reported by CBS News, in Steve Hartman’s “On the Road” segment, published May 15, 2026. Retold here with the details as that report gives them.
