When Lori and Daron VanderHeiden were first featured in Hutchinson, pictured in a District 423 computer lab nearly 30 years ago, they wore a pair of Hutchinson Tigers sweaters.
At the time it was a fairly simple symbolic gesture. The husband-and-wife team had been living in Austin, each driving a different direction to their early teaching jobs in separate consolidated districts. Each coached three sports.
“So, our goal: We really had identified a few places in the state that we wanted to raise our family in,” Daron said.
Hutchinson ultimately won it, with the district realizing it had its first (already married) spousal team with Daron at the middle school and Lori at the high school. They were both officially Hutchinson Tigers.
But it was unlikely anyone knew just how far they’d go for the team.
This past week, Lori and Daron reflected upon their careers in Hutchinson, both having served as coaches, teachers and administrators before their retirement into the community they had chosen. The story starts even sooner than the old 1994 photo.
CAREER PATHS
Lori, who grew up in Cleveland, Minnesota, six miles from St. Peter where Daron graduated from high school, started attending Gustavus Adolphus in the 1980s. Her first summer back, she and Daron were working at the Red Owl Grocery Store in St. Peter when they started dating. The relationship kept on as Daron attended Mankato State, and they eventually married.
Lori focused on English and coaching, Daron on technology education.
During her six years at Southland Schools, Lori taught middle school language arts and a seventh grade health class that focused on skills for adolescence.
“That class impacted me for the rest of my teaching career,” she said. “The things I learned there I was able to apply to everything else I did teaching, and as principal. It was things like teaching kids about family relationships, peer relationships, decision making, how to handle emotions. All of those things I used just interacting with people in an educational setting. That was instrumental to me.”
At Hutchinson High School she taught a variety of classes, including English and humanities, while earning a master’s degree in language arts. When she taught at Hutchinson Middle School from 1998 to 2002, she became interested in reading and literacy. That focus led her to become Park Elementary’s assistant principal from 2002-2017.
“Literacy is the door that opens all other learning,” she said.
For the final few years of her career, Lori returned to classroom teaching. She went full circle and taught English, including Advanced Placement English, at the high school until retiring early this year.
She also launched the introduction to education class, which linked high school to the Southwest Minnesota State University teaching education program. Such a class is the first any college student takes on their road to becoming a teacher.
Daron started at the New Richland-Hartland-Ellendale-Geneva School District, then taught technical education at Hutchinson Middle School for a year. That’s when the district went through a budget cut, and it included his position. Ultimately, he was brought back to teach at the middle school and high school for a year before he moved on to become a high school technical education teacher.
For seven years, “I taught everything from engineering classes to the drafting classes, to the cabinetry, woodworking, construction classes,” Daron said.
After earning his master’s in curriculum and instruction and licensure, Daron served as the assistant principal for Hutchinson High School for a few years, then as principal at West Elementary. In 2006, he stepped into the role many today know him for: Hutchinson Public Schools superintendent. He remained at the helm until this summer.
The role had him focused on the district’s overall health and stability. Under his watch the TigerPath Academy program launched at Hutchinson High School. The district green-lighted the REACH program. And administrators made modernizing and future-proofing the district’s buildings and infrastructure a priority. And while all of that and more kept him busy, there were aspects he wished he didn’t have to leave behind.
“I really missed teaching the engineering and draft courses,” Daron said. “I missed that interaction with students.”
CHALLENGES AND GROWTH
Seeing Hutchinson Public Schools from the perspective of teachers and administrators meant Lori and Daron saw challenges from top to bottom. For Daron, one that stands out is on the financial side.
“Early on in our career in Hutchinson there were a lot of budget issues, facility issues. At the time the district had a hard time passing bond and levy referendums, which created a lot of issues. ... That’s one reason I went into administration. I wanted to be part of that solution.”
When the school district began to seriously push to renovate its buildings a few years ago, starting with a major overhaul at the Hutchinson High School, Daron was constantly available to the public, speaking at events and attending meetings. He said he is happy to have been part of rallying support for such updates, but he’s proud to have watched as Hutchinson student achievement scores rose higher and higher, establishing it as a top school in Minnesota.
He described the school’s relationship with local businesses, business development and government as “unique.”
“It is not typical,” Daron said. “Usually, these types of government organizations work in isolation. In Hutchinson we do not. I’m as proud of that as anything else.”
There’s also the school’s green spaces, practice fields, activity spaces and a new, state-of-the-art auditorium for Hutchinson residents to enjoy.
“We’ve just really modernized our K-12 system and a lot of that is due to community support,” Daron said.
For her part, Lori saw one of the greatest challenges for educators as the push to address individual needs in behavior and academics.
“It seemed like at the beginning everyone was trying in their own way to meet those individual needs,” she said. “Then what happened is we started to systematize those intervention systems. An individual teacher wouldn’t have to come up with their individual interventions they weren’t trained to do. They had a team of experts working with their students inside the intervention system.”
It’s that kind of teamwork that makes her look back on her career with pride.
“Those systems, those interventions, those are still in place. And will continue to be,” Lori said. “That will continue to be how we do school.”
FORTUNE AND FAMILY
There was one other job both Daron and Lori picked up along the way, as well. While their careers unfolded at Hutchinson Public Schools, they raised two children. Taylor was born in 1992 and Jacob in 1996.
That meant the couple had a lot of hats to wear — parent, supervisor, teacher, co-worker — in different settings, with different people and each other.
“We feel really fortunate and blessed we were both able to work for the same district, and both of our kids went all the way through school, K-12,” Daron said. “There were times we were our children’s principals, superintendents, and as a family I think our two children handled it very well.”
With how involved Daron and Lori were, it was impossible not to talk about school, education and ongoing learning at home.
“We were mentors for each other,” Lori said.
Lori said the family found the old adage, “it takes a village to raise a child” a reality in Hutchinson. They also found many lifelong friends.
“Our children had the best teachers, and we got to work with these same respected colleagues who were helping to raise our children,” she said. “There is such a benefit to raising a family in a town like Hutchinson.”
But there were aspects over which confidentiality had to be maintained, as well. Everyone had to be mindful of what role they were playing and what the rules were.
“Both of my kids were in high school and Lori was an assistant principal at Park at the time,” Daron said, recalling one instance where confidentiality had an unintended result. “Back in the day before all the technology and everything we have now, I would get up and drive all the roads in the morning and connect with the bus company to see what we were going to do (during heavy snow) and go into the office to make the call if we were late or if we would close. And, of course, I would forget to tell my own family. So, we close school and I’m in at 4 in the morning and I announce it and get it out there and both my kids and Lori get up, dressed ready for school, and there was no school.”
“We just assumed Daron would tell us,” Lori said.
AHEAD IN EDUCATION
But now the baton has been passed. The kids are all grown up. Someone else gets to decide what snow means for students in Hutchinson. In the meantime, work to educate them will contnue, and the kids are in good hands, Daron and Lori said. With the school’s buildings in good shape for years to come, one key order of business these next few years will be building connections.
“If we learned anything from COVID, it’s, ‘Yes, we can change, we can deliver education differently.’ But we also learned kids need to socialize and they need to be with each other. They need that peer interaction,” Daron said. “While, yes, technology has been a success, kids need each other and to be physically in spaces with each other. It’s so important for mental health and their mental stability.”
Technology, he said, has a key role in the future of education, but the foundations remain the same.
“The biggest key is relationships,” Lori said. “It’s hard to create relationships through a computer. ... Kids will perform. They care if they know someone else cares. As much as we try as teachers to convey that over the computer, over the distance learning … it’s way different when you can have that personal connection face to face with a student.”
NO MORE 5 A.M.?
After years of early mornings there’s no longer anything forcing Daron and Lori to get up at times many would consider unfair.
Daron said it took him a few weeks for it to really sink in that he no longer had to get up at 5 a.m. Then, he added, “I still don’t know if I’m really adjusted.”
The good news is, even if they wake up at 5 a.m., they don’t have to get up now. As of Feb. 14 and July 15, Lori and Daron were, respectively, in the clear. It was the right time, they said.
“We had talked about doing this together,” Lori said.
“Being the superintendent in one district for 16 years is really uncommon,” Daron said. “One of my goals before I retired was to complete all the facility projects. When I got to the end of that, then I knew it was probably time to retire.”
Renovations to Park Elementary, the last building calling for improvements after projects in other buildings, are funded, approved and underway this summer.
It’s possible Daron and Lori will find something more to do in education. It’s been discussed. But so has an honest break.
“We said for one school year we are actually going to be retired,” Lori said.
And they’ll stick around.
“We love Hutchinson,” Daron said. “We love the community. This is our home. This is where we are going to continue to live.”
“We are so grateful for the opportunity to serve the community for the last 28 years,” Lori said. “We’ve lived and worked alongside wonderful, wonderful people.”
