Paris Junior College is honoring two of its longest-serving leaders, Charles Lynch and Ginna Bowman, who stepped down from the PJC Board of Regents effective June 22, 2026, closing decades of combined service to the college and the communities it serves.
Their paths to the boardroom could hardly have been more different. One arrived as a teenager with a scholarship in hand; the other came in mid-career to run a plant. Both stayed, and both spent their years of service answering the same question in their own way: what does this college owe its community, and what does the community owe its college?
Ginna Bowman: A Story That Came Full Circle
Ginna Bowman's connection to Paris Junior College, as she puts it, “goes back a long time.”
She was a high school student in Norman, Oklahoma, where her father served in the ROTC program at the university. When he fell seriously ill with the Asian flu and retired, the family came to Paris — and Bowman, arriving for her senior year, found herself the new girl in a new town.
Paris Junior College changed that. At her high school graduation, Bowman received the Pat Mayes Paris News scholarship to attend PJC. When she arrived on campus, she discovered something that would stay with her for the rest of her life: a place where everyone belonged.
“When I got here, everybody really had come from somewhere else, and that made me fit,” Bowman said. “I had wonderful professors, and I learned so much here.”
That experience — of a college that took in a newcomer and gave her a start — is the reason she gives for seeking a seat on the Board of Regents years later. “The reason that I wanted to serve on this board is that I always had an interest, because it meant so much to me,” she said.
Representing Place 6, Bowman served on the board under three college presidents and helped select two of them: Dr. Pam Anglin and current president Dr. Stephen Benson. “It's been my honor,” she said of those decisions — among the most consequential a regent ever makes.
Some memories from her tenure belong to the whole town. In March 2005, the unranked Dragons men's basketball team swept through the national tournament in Hutchinson, Kansas, and brought home the NJCAA Division I national championship. “That was a great thing,” Bowman recalled. “I have a signed ball from all those players, and the whole town was just so thrilled over that.”
But asked about the most rewarding part of serving, Bowman doesn't point to a trophy. She points to a stage. “I think it's at graduation — seeing all those smiling faces that have been trained in our workforce programs, or are going on to more academic courses at another institution,” she said.
Charles Lynch: The Newcomer Who Never Left
Charles Lynch came to Paris in the mid-1990s, arriving through his career in industry to a management role at Kimberly-Clark. Like Bowman decades before him, he came from somewhere else — and like her, he made Paris home.
Lynch speaks plainly about why a small rural community needs its college. What matters, he says, is that people have access to acquire skills and an education that improves their lives — and he points to PJC's health occupations programs as the clearest example. Without the college's nursing and emergency medical services graduates, he argues, the local hospital would struggle to recruit the numbers required to operate, and the highly qualified people it needs would be far more difficult to bring to a rural community.
Representing Place 4 on the nine-member board, Lynch helped steward the college through years of growth, including the 2024 opening of the new workforce training facility at the PJC–Greenville Center — a 23,000-square-foot investment in Hunt County's workforce that he attended alongside Bowman and their fellow regents.
“The most rewarding part is the networking with fellow members of the board and having an opportunity to have some impact on the community,” Lynch said. “The success of the college is critically important to the community. It was great for me to be able to participate in advising an institution that has so much impact in a positive way in this community.”
His favorite memory, though, sounds a great deal like Bowman's. Lynch describes the experience of attending commencement and watching graduates cross the stage — many of them first-generation college students from families with no history of higher education — and realizing that the school he helped grow and keep thriving is providing people with access to opportunity and, quite often, to entirely new careers.
He leaves with a message to those who will follow him: that Paris Junior College offers quality education at a reasonable price, and that future board members must protect that tradition and carry the vision forward.
A Shared Legacy — and a College Looking Forward
For all the differences in their stories, Lynch and Bowman leave behind the same inheritance: a college that remains, in Lynch's words, a main provider of opportunity for a rural community — and one that both regents believe is in good hands.
“I see a great future,” Bowman said. “I think we have a very visionary president now. He will do an outstanding job leading us — and he's already doing it.”
“On behalf of Paris Junior College, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Ginna Bowman and Charles Lynch for their many years of dedicated service to our institution. Their leadership, wisdom, and unwavering commitment have helped guide the College through important periods of growth and change. Both have consistently placed the interests of our students and communities first, and their contributions have left a lasting impact on Paris Junior College. We are sincerely grateful for their service and wish them both the very best in the years ahead," said PJC President Dr. Stephen Benson.
About Paris Junior College
Paris Junior College has served Northeast Texas since 1924, offering Associate in Arts, Associate in Science, and Associate in Applied Science degrees, as well as Certificates of Proficiency in technical and workforce fields, at campuses in Paris, Greenville, and Sulphur Springs. Learn more at parisjc.edu.