A teacher shares her gift - again
Role model, career here shaped interim 308 chief's love of her work.
Jan Strecker knew she wanted to be a teacher from the time she was in the first grade, in a two-room, white-frame schoolhouse in the Osborne County town of Covert. It was all because of Miss Marilee, a short, dark-haired, bespectacled first-year teacher.
"I think it was probably her enthusiasm and the enthusiasm she built in me for reading," said Strecker, who grew up with eight brothers and sisters on a farm 12 miles from the nearest paved road. "For me, the most exciting thing was that I learned to read. That just opened up a whole new world. She would encourage us all, even someone who was struggling a little bit. It was like how exciting this is and how smart you are and you can learn this thing. Even though she was teaching four grades, she found time for every single one of us."
Covert is a ghost town now, and the old school fell down a few years ago.
But a lot of Miss Marilee rubbed off on Strecker, who went on to become a teacher, principal and assistant superintendent and who came out of retirement this month to serve as interim superintendent of the Hutchinson Public Schools through the upcoming school year.
It is a job she calls "a gift," from the school district to her and from her to the school district.
"I see it as a gift to me, to bring closure to my career, and to do that final thing, that final gift to the district of giving you some time and some stability you might not have if I weren't here," Strecker said.
After all, the Hutchinson schools have been a big part of her life.
Strecker's first job in education was as a fifth-grade teacher at Hutchinson's now closed Grandview Elementary in 1967. Over the next 12 years, she also taught second grade, kindergarten, in a language development classroom and in a developmentally delayed first grade in the Hutchinson school system.
Later she taught or served as a principal in Great Bend, Hesston and Sterling before returning to the Hutchinson school system as principal at Graber Elementary in 1997. After seven years, she became director of elementary education and then assistant superintendent in 2005.
But then her husband, Al, died in December 2008.
"My last six months in this district were very challenging, not because of the job but because of the death of my husband," Strecker said.
So she decided to retire, regroup and reidentify herself. "Anyone who has been through that understands you have to do that because when you've lived with someone for 43.5 years, your identity is immersed with that other person," she said. "So now you're not that same person."
Strecker moved to Lawrence to be closer to her two sons, Scott and Stuart, and her five grandchildren. During the ensuing year, Strecker spent a lot of time with her grandchildren, wrote some poetry and started on a memoir of her mother and her mother's favorite recipes. She also volunteered at Lawrence Memorial Hospital in a program called Life Stories, in which she and others interviewed patients in a rehabilitation unit and wrote one- or two-page life stories, one copy of which was given to the patient and another put in their medical chart so that doctors and nurses would have a better understanding of their patients.
Then when she heard that David Flowers was resigning as Hutchinson's superintendent, she let headhunter Max Heim of the Kansas Association of School Boards know that she'd be interested in serving as interim superintendent if the board didn't hire a long-term replacement in the short time it had before the start of the new fiscal year. The Board of Education took her up on the offer when it was unable to lure Superintendent Rick Atha away from the Garden City schools.
"Having this opportunity is like I get to come back and bring closure to my career, probably in the way I would have preferred to do it in the first place," she said. "But because life intervened, I took a little different route."
Strecker began work as interim superintendent on July 6. She attended five meetings that first day. She's still attending a lot of meetings.
"There's an awful lot of pieces to the job, just trying to understand all the different roles I have to play in the district," she said. "I've been meeting with all the administrative staff, individually, for 30 minutes to hear what their concerns are, what they want to change, what they don't want to change, what their biggest challenges are and what I can do to be supportive."
What she's hearing is that they want to make sure the district remains focused on students and learning and continuous improvement and retains its sense of teamwork.
On Monday, the former teacher visited three classes, including a summer school class and another for English Language Learners, "just to be around kids."
"You have to have that kid connection so we don't ever forget why we're here," she said.
The most meaningful moments in her career, she said, have been "when you know when the light bulb comes on for a child, when you're working with them on something, you're teaching them and boom, they get it."
Also rewarding have been those times when teachers have been able to improve themselves because of their work together.
"I remember my first principalship in Great Bend," she said. "When I left, one of the teachers said to me, 'I am a better teacher because I worked with you.' That has been my role, forever, to help, whether it's kids or teachers or principals, to improve their skills and do a better job because of the work we've done together. So I guess you're always a teacher, no matter what you're doing."
Last week, Strecker took a hard-hat tour with Bob Williams, USD 308's bond project manager, to see how Hutchinson's schools are being transformed by the $78.6 million bond program approved by voters in 2006. Strecker was around for the successful campaign and participated in planning the expansion and renovation projects made possible by the bonds.
"It was exciting for me because I was in all those planning meetings," Strecker said. "I saw all those plans on paper and, especially at the elementary level, was very much involved in developing the plans on paper. But to actually to get out there and see the finished project, it was just a big 'Wow. Oh my gosh, we did it.' "
Sometime in the fall, the school board will re-advertise the superintendent's position and begin the search for a long-term superintendent to take over next July.
In the meantime, Strecker wants to ensure that the district keeps moving forward. The district already has a five-year strategic plan, and she wants to make sure that those things the plan calls for in the coming year get done.
She's also prepared "to deal with things that come up." Like funding. This last year, Kansas school districts had to go back and cut their budgets twice after the start of the fiscal year because of reductions in state aid. With the fragile economy, there's no guarantee they won't have to do some more cutting in the next 11 months.
She's also concerned about reductions in staff and increases in class size and the morale of employees who aren't getting a raise because of the tight budget.
"If I could wave a magic wand," Strecker said, "every single child would be successful, every single child would be meeting (Adequate Yearly Progress) and every single teacher would have the resources to meet those children's needs."
Article taken from the Hutchinson News - July 22, 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment