With the close of last school year, I completed my 30th campaign in education. Each of those years has been filled with joy and sorrow, challenges and successes, ups and downs and a ton of stories worth sharing. My (True) Life in Education Thus Far will detail 30 or so of those stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed living (most) of them!
LIKE YOU’RE THERE FOR ME, TOO
SEPTEMBER 21, 2022
If I try very, very hard, I think I can recall each person with whom I was hired at Regis Jesuit High School. Considering we signed our first contracts over 20 years ago, that feels like something of a feat to me. This past spring, May of 2022, the last hold out – the last person from my first year at the school who had been there continuously – departed. There are no teachers on staff from the hiring class of 1994 any longer.
It was a large group of new hires; the number approached 20. At the time, we were told that this was the largest new hire class in the history of the school. In the 20 years that followed, it was the largest I experienced bracketing the year we opened a new division of the school… but more on that in a future edition.
Our specialties ranged through the academic departments, though athletics and through extra curriculars. Within the first year, many of us found ourselves in leadership positions. The school found how many of us were excellent teachers. And we found in one another fast friends.
Kathleen and Steve and Kelly and Tim and John and Chris and John and Mike… and more.
Looking at the list, our parents were, collectively, not that creative with first names, were they?
There were not 10 years separating the youngest of us from the oldest of us in age and we were living very similar lives.
I remember the departments we worked in, the classrooms we shared, the dances we staffed. I remember us going to one another’s weddings and having children. I remember when the first of us left and what that felt like.
There are more stories to tell, and I will tell some to be sure, but I am not a good enough storyteller to convey what these people meant to me and what they – and those early years at Regis Jesuit – still mean to me.
We were a team and we could be a force to be reckoned with. Though it is very much cliche, we had each other’s backs. Always. Perhaps too often. We were all but blind in our loyalty to one another. They were there for me and I was there for them.
I cannot imagine another group of people I would have rather begun a 20 year journey with than these.