Originally posted Thursday, January 31, 2019 by RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com on his AJC Radio & TV Talk blog
Ron Clark, founder of the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, will be part of the cast of the 38th season of "Survivor" starting February 20.
The show was shot over a span of six weeks last summer in Fiji. He will be one of 18 competing to win $1 million, including four returning players.
He told Entertainment Weekly: "I'm a compassionate person, but everyone who knows me well says that during competitions I turn into a villain. I also over-analyze everything."
The earnestly enthusiastic Clark is 46 and has operated the non-profit middle school the past decade with executive director Kim Bearden. He designed as an incubator for his teaching methods with more than 50,000 educators having visited his school since 2007. Oprah Winfrey is one of his biggest supporters.
The kids, as part of their learning, take trips all over the world. He connects with the kids with his rapping and double-dutch skills.
RELATED: My 2006 profile on Ron Clark
Lifetime showed a film about how he became a teacher in 2006 called "The Ron Clark Story" starring Matthew Perry as Clark.
His school just released a video of his kids with Ludacris welcoming Super Bowl visitors to Atlanta:
The EW interview also noted one of his pet peeves:
“I’m a sore loser. Like really sore. I’ll stew over a Monopoly loss for weeks, wondering, ‘Just where did I go wrong?’”
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