Recipes for Living David and Janet Walkup

Both David and Janet came from north Iowa, David from Carroll County where he was born in 1952 and lived until he left for college. Janet is from Lake City. David's parents farmed, his mother was a County Health Nurse. Janet's father was a music teacher, and her mother was a stay-at-home mom. David's mother passed away in 1986, and his father remarried a lady from Glidden, Iowa. He turned 80 this past year and is physically fit. He and David played golf several days before this story was begun, and the two couples get together as much as possible, at either home, and have good times.

Janet is the oldest sibling with three brothers and a sister. Each of them has three children, so family get-togethers are large and fun. Janet's parents are both still living and enjoy coming to Osceola. They love visiting the boat.

David and Janet met in 1971 while she was still in high school. She graduated and went on to UNI (University of Northern Iowa) for two years before they were married, then completed her college education at Buena Vista. David went to Buena Vista for four years after high school. He tells that he celebrated his birthday, graduated, and was married within two weeks in 1974. After 31 years together, he says, "We've had a good life. Janet is my best friend as well as my wife. I enjoy being around her."

During summer vacations, the couple enjoys traveling. In the summer of 2005, they were in San Antonio, Phoenix, and Houston. Janet has a brother in Phoenix, and a brother and their son, Todd, are in Houston. They enjoy golf, and Janet's personal hobbies are reading and doing crossword puzzles in ink. "She's a pretty sharp cookie."

David and Janet have three children: The oldest, Todd, graduated from Simpson College, and is a marketing manager for Aggreko, a company that rents and sells huge generators. He is just back from a company meeting held in Paris, France.

Kari graduated from UNI. She was married last year, and of all the pictures he has, David's favorite is of her and her father dancing together at her wedding. Kari is an account executive for Holmes-Murphy in Cedar Rapids. She is membership chairman for the Rotary Club and is president of Toastmasters in their community. "She is a fireball and a superstar."

Tom graduated from Clarke and is enrolled at UNI, preparing to be a teacher. He is mowing grass at the cemetery in Osceola this summer. He is following his parents in their chosen careers in education, in spite of them telling their children they needed to pursue another, more lucrative career. Of course, they support Tom in his decision and feel he is uniquely qualified. Tom is a great communicator and people like to visit with him. He has some remarkable personal skills. The first evidence of this was a day when he and Janet were walking down a street and met a lady to whom he said, "Hi." She was a stranger to Janet, but Tom knew her as the grandma of one of his little friends. She replied, "Hi, Tom." There are no strangers as far as he is concerned, and he is skilled in remembering names and faces.

David says, "We have been fortunate to have good kids and I don't know that we have any secret about raising them. Each one of our children is different. I suppose the work ethic, which I learned in my home, has been obvious and passed along to our children. I'm a farm kid and I worked. I always thought more about getting the job done than the hours I put in: A piece of advice Dad gave me has been a directive for my life. He said, 'If you are going to be a garbage collector, be the best garbage collector you can be.' He didn't care what I did, but that was the attitude I was to have. He's always been supportive of me.

"But I give Janet credit for a nice job of raising our children. For one thing, she made a decision to stay home with them. The only exception was when she worked during the time I was getting my Masters' degree at Oklahoma State. I took night classes and was home in the daytime. We had Todd and Kari then, and that was fun for me. I didn't have that kind of time with Tom.

"Family, including the extended family, has always been important. We've always gone back to share goings-on with their grandmas and grandpas. We are involved with and regularly attend church. I was a Presbyterian when we were married, Janet a Catholic. We talked about this and looked ahead to having children. We wanted no division in our family and I chose to convert to Catholicism. The priest we had may have been like Jesse James, with notches in his gun for converts. He wanted to win me over pretty bad."

Both David and Janet are educators. David, Mr. Walkup, is the high school principal in Clarke Community Schools. Janet teaches at I-35 in the gifted program. She laughs to remember a student recently asking, "When you went to school, were you a nerd?" Her first thought was to wonder why he felt the need to ask that question, but supposes she probably was. She was in band, chorus, speech, and those types of things, but was also a cheerleader so there were other activities and interests as well.

During David's teaching career, they have lived in eight communities: Storm Lake, Primghar, Paulina (10 miles down the road from Primghar), Stillwater, Oklahoma, while Dave went to graduate school, Sully, Winfield, Manson, and Osceola. They have been here five years and "We love Osceola! We like the location, and we like the people. But everywhere we've gone we've made good friends, and we've always had good neighbors. Dad says the reason is that we are good neighbors. We are supportive of them when they need support and try to help as much as possible." One of the big events for David was being invited back to Primghar for their 25th anniversary. Todd was their only child at the time, and now he's away from home. David recalls, "It was nice to be invited. We got to talk about what had happened to them and to me."

David tells about Clarke Community Schools: One of the reasons I came here was to initiate an Alternative School, which I'd seen other places. It needs to be clarified up front that by no means is the Alternative School a behavior situation. The students apply to get into the program. For whatever reason, what we are doing here in usual classroom instruction is not working for them. They need individualized instruction. There is a committee which meets weekly and says yes or no to the application. The maximum we are allowed is 36 students.

We studied how we could do the program and began in 2001. It is held on the Osceola campus of SWICC (Southwest Iowa Community College). We were very fortunate to get an experienced teacher when we hired Mel Miller, who had been teaching in an alternative school in Mt. Ayr. Another teacher was Lonna McDonough, a very caring teacher who had taught in Clarke Community High School for 36 years before she retired. I told her she had to sign on for five years, but she retired after one year, and we replaced her with Shelly Webb. Presently Milton Vining and Shelly are each half-time. Milton is a special education teacher, which we need for some of our students. I call him my safety net. He does a nice job catching all the kids who "fall through cracks." Shelly is going to be reassigned next year. She will be at the Alternative School and the TAG (Talented and Gifted) teacher a half day each. I think that will be a nice combination. She is very enthusiastic and energetic.

There are individual curriculums that match up closely to those in the regular school, but they are all individualized. We have one student going to Alternative School so she can graduate in three years. Minnesota is a little ahead of Iowa with this program, and about 10% of their school population is in Alternative School. More and more the gifted and talented kids choose alternative schools to be challenged rather than bored. Dual credit classes we offered this past school year, partnering with SWICC and Graceland College, include Business Systems, Carpentry, Medical Terms, Health Occupations, Biology, Calculus I and IT, Advanced Psychology, English Composition I and IT, and Introduction to Criminal Justice. There were 156 students participating in the 2004-2005 school year.

I don't want to give the impression that the Alternative School is just a place to learn. Alternative School is a placement, not a place to learn. There is a difference. There are students who are in the regular school and in the Alternative School. The construction class is an example. The students are the ones who built the house south of the library, and one at the golf course. Usually the foundation is poured, and sometimes they bring in local people to work with the kids on electrical and plumbing installation, but the kids are supposed to do most of the work. They surely do all the "grunt work." This next year, everything but the landscaping will be done by the students. Mike West is coming in to finish that. Until now, this has been a shared program with other area schools, but next year we have 27 kids who want to take this course, so we will have enough kids to do it on our own. It will be an all Clarke house next year.

However, it is a partnership accomplishment. Clarke Community Schools have teamed with CCDC (Clarke County Development Corporation) and SWICC. The students work and get the experience. They can take that course for two years and earn an AA (Associate Arts) degree at Southwestern. These are college classes they are taking at the high school level. We've now had a number of students who didn't fit in the regular school but have been very successful in the Alternative School. In years past they earned a Kirkwood diploma. This was the first year we had a Clarke Learning Center diploma, and seven students received it. They graduated as part of the class of 99 young people. We are very proud of that.

These are difficult times for young people. They are confronted by and exposed to situations that call for difficult decisions. This has always been the case, but in these times a wrong decision can have more disastrous results than ever before. We regard it as our responsibility to address that, and we have taken a positive approach. We participate in a state wide character education K-12 (kindergarten through grade 12) program called "Character Counts." We began it at the high school probably four years ago with "Pursing Victory with Honor" for athletics. This coming year we will institute "Honor above All." It has to do with plagiarizing and cheating. This is a real problem now because of the amount of pressure put on kids to get good grades. The use of internet web pages can offer a significant temptation. Kids can "Google," any subject and instead of reading, they can plagiarize it. The Executive Director of "Character Counts," Scott Raecker, was here with Governor Ray this spring. We tried to educate our kids about Governor Ray ahead of his visit, but I am not sure they knew how important he has been to Iowa. He did a nice job with our kids. What a marvelous man! A very caring individual!

I think "Character Counts" has helped a lot. It has become common terminology. Additionally, we have a six pillars of character program. Throughout our school buildings, including elementary, there are large charts calling attention to them: responsibility, respect, caring, trustworthiness, citizenship, and fairness; and there have been assembly programs and classroom speakers on the various subjects.

Kids maybe troubled for a variety of reasons. We have 700 individuals in this building, grades 7-12. We have recently had two deaths - one a student who had graduated, and the other who would be a senior. As a school, we have not had a chance to talk about that, although we brought the softball and baseball teams in to talk about it to see what is going on in their minds. Even though we will put off dealing with it until fall, it is an issue we will have to deal with. Sandye Kelso goes beyond the traditional role of counselor and does a wonderful job working with the kids in these sorts of situations.

I don't know that we have a specific action plan for accommodating students who have problems, but we work it out, get people together, and try to find the best solution we can. Most of the time the parents are involved. We deal with problems within the school, but we also have other resources. When we had an attempted suicide last year, we had the police involved, and the students had evaluations in Des Moines. We have what we call a STAT team - Student/Teacher/ Assistance Team. It starts with a check list to see if we are all seeing the same type of behavior. We work with parents and give them the information, maybe with some suggestions. Sometimes they are taken, sometimes not. As a school, we cannot mandate very much. We try to recommend as much as we can.

There are restrictions put on teachers now regarding discipline. We can't touch the child, which I never did anyway except to break up a fight. That doesn't happen here as much as it did when I came here five years ago. We had 31 fights my first year here and last year we had six. There has been a difference in the climate and the culture. I remember the first young lady who came in with a nosebleed from a fight. When I asked why she was fighting, her answer was, "Mr. Walkup, you don't understand. This is the way we settle things here." I said, "That's the way you used to settle them. We're going to work on different ways to do that." That student has graduated now. I think it has a lot to do with the visibility of our faculty. We have emphasized listening and helping kids go to the right people to talk things out. With 700 people in crowded hallways, everything will not always go the way they should.

Some of that will be alleviated next year when we start a middle school. I became acquainted with this concept when I was superintendent at Manson Northwest Webster, and Rob Cordes, the current Carroll superintendent, was the Middle School principal. We talked about it a lot at Clarke, particularly when Joe Shelton was here. I finally asked Mr. Cox if we could study this and make a recommendation to the Board. He was supportive.

Our study revealed that we were using junior high and high school teachers back and forth. We had to determine that we would have different schedules for middle school and high school, with different type of bells, in order that the kids would not be out in the halls at the same time. There will be a definite division between middle school and high school kids. Even though they are in the same building, they will be separated. We found that Albia had the same situation, so we went there first, two years ago, to see their solution. That was one of the key factors. The other was that, in sharing teachers between junior high and high school, we were just doing assembly line teaching. There was never any quality control to know whether or not our students were doing well. We were just pushing them through the classes as fast as possible. There were times the kids didn't have their work done and there was no time to do it. We believe, in the middle school plan, we are gaining more time with our kids.

In the middle school concept, we will have core classes meeting in the first five periods of the day: social studies, science, language/arts, and math. What is really neat about the middle school concept is that, at the end of the day, there is a study hall supervised by the core teachers. If a kid is having problems, he will be able to go to that teacher, get the needed information, and get the work done. If they need to have help, they can get that. We will probably not have as much homework as we've had in the past.

One of the worst things we've done is to say, "Okay, your assignment for the day is to read such and such a book and come back and answer questions." In the new plan, we will start out by having a student know where the beginning is. They have to know that in order for the brain to communicate to other parts of the brain, "This is our starting point." We've done some things at the end of the year to reward students for their behavior. What we need to do is have the program at the beginning of the year, so they can understand and grow from there. All of our students will be starting at the same place, even at high school, although they've gone through all the elementary things. Some students have had more fulfilling experiences than others. We need to be sure all the students are starting at the same place in our book or chapter or project, or whatever.

Faculty members have been part of this all along. They had two weeks of training, one period at a summer camp at Simpson College in Indianola, one working among themselves. This was during the weeks of the June 13 and 20, 2005. John Stetler was there to work with them.

We are looking at what is important. It's interesting, on the state level, schools are agreeing that the most important thing for elementary kids is reading; but when we get to the secondary level, nobody wants to touch reading. Now that has changed, I think, because of ''No Child Left Behind." Whether or not that is a good program, we are definitely going to focus more on reading and that's a good thing. Right now we have 117 in high school, 67 in junior high, who are not scored above the forty percentile, identifying them as needing help with reading. We are going to hire a new teacher, and 38 of our 52 teachers will be studying reading across the curriculum. We will be doing staff development with the ABA (Area Education Agency) three full days next year. We are putting a lot of emphasis on reading.

Graduation is a great day, but I tell each of the kids they need to go on to get more education. They are probably going to change jobs and even careers seven times during their lives. They will have to have communication skills, computer and technology skills, and personal skills so they can work with other people to get things done. All those things are not only important they are and will be essential. The best way to get these skills is to be a life-long learner. At whatever age, it is important to continue to educate and train ourselves.