If Union Township School Corp. Superintendent John Hunter’s office seems spartan for someone who has been superintendent for 20 years, it’s because he’s been cleaning his office in preparation for his retirement just days from now.
June 8, graduation day for Wheeler High School seniors, is also Hunter’s graduation to retirement.
“It’s amazing how much stuff you accumulate in 20 years,” he said. “I took more boxes home than my wife would have liked.”
That 20 years began at a time when the district was growing. Hunter took over from E. Ric Frataccia, who had been superintendent for 10 years. “It was pretty academically sound,” Hunter said.
The district had just added a pool, auditorium, fieldhouse and 10 classrooms to the middle school and high school.
The facilities have changed even more since then.
“None of the classrooms at that point in time had telephones in them,” Hunter said, an obvious concern when school safety was becoming an issue following the start of the nation’s epidemic of school shootings.
Teachers at Union Center Elementary School had buttons in their classrooms to call the office over the intercom, but many weren’t working.
The district put in a robust information technology infrastructure, including voice over internet protocol phones. Hunter remembers those days. He had to dial 7 to get an outside line, and there were just four phone lines available. “I had to dial 10 digits to get anyone from Simatovich (Elementary School),” he said.
“Through the years, we did a lot for school safety,” Hunter said.
Entrances now require key fobs to open doors. “Back in that day, every door in the building was open.”
That’s not all the facility changes that have happened over the last 20 years. As might be expected, there have been upgrades to HVAC systems, roofs and the like.
At Union Center, “we basically replaced that entire school,” Hunter said.
A new transportation building was built so buses don’t have to be stored at the schools.
The football stadium was upgraded, including a turf field, tennis courts and tracks. Turf baseball, softball and multipurpose fields were installed.
The athletics complex has a new driveway and parking lots. A grassy area can be used for either soccer or football, depending on how the stripes are laid down.
Along the way, the school district has seen a string of successes, including state championships for boys basketball in 2010 and girls softball in 2011. The girls soccer team has been state runner-up twice. There have been academic successes, too, including for the high school science team and English team. Individual competitors have advanced to state competitions, too.
Among the biggest challenges Hunter faced at Union Township was the period from 2008 to 2010, when the economy soured. In December 2008, Gov. Mitch Daniels forced the district to cut $400,000 from its budget.
“We couldn’t just not pay people,” Hunter said, so administrators took pay cuts, staff took furlough days, some noncertified employees were laid off, retirement buyouts were offered and fees were increased.
The COVID-19 pandemic was hard on schools. “That was a big challenge for everybody,” Hunter said. The county’s school superintendents met with the health department March 13, 2020. Hunter remembers it well. They met in the school library not far from his office.
Together, they devised a time to close schools thinking it would be over in two weeks. Instead, they were closed the rest of the school year.
“It was a very stressful time for a lot of them,” Hunter said, as students and educators adjusted to virtual classes after a lifetime of in-person instruction.
Deaths over the years, including students, hit hard, too. “It’s tough on schools, tough on our community. They’re our family,” he said.
Hunter’s education career was shaped by a new teacher he had as a sixth grader. She put their desks in small groups instead of rows. She had student helpers, “which changed my perspective on learning.”
Through middle and high school, he had more teachers like that.
At Indiana State University, during his first semester, education students were put in a classroom to get a taste of teaching. “I thought it was ingenious at the time,” he said, to help college students decide early on whether a career as an educator seemed right.
When Hunter began teaching, Gov. Robert Orr’s Primetime initiative had just begun to lower class sizes in kindergarten and first grade. But Hunter taught third grade in Elkhart. “I had 33 third-graders my first year,” he said.
When Indiana decided to stop issuing lifetime teaching licenses for educators with master’s degrees, Hunter hurried to qualify under the old rules and got an administrator license as well.
After 14 years as principal, first in Goshen and then at Brummit Elementary in Chesterton, Hunter got his superintendent license, persuaded to do so by one of his ISU professors.
His 20 years at Union Township make him one of the state’s longest-serving school superintendents. Tom Hunter, at Greensburg, has been there 25 years. When Greensburg had an opening for an assistant superintendent, John Hunter joked about applying just to confuse people.
The two Hunters are unrelated.
John Hunter said he doesn’t have specific plans for his retirement. He would be open to serving as an interim superintendent somewhere, and he would consider a business development position.
“I’m definitely going to hit that little white ball a little more often than I do now,” he said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
