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By GLEN WERLING
If our personalities are made up of bits and pieces of the personalities of others we have known, then Southern Wells Supt. Neil Potter must have known some pretty remarkable people.
The affable Potter will be retiring at the end of this month, closing out 10-years in the captain’s position at the helm of the Southern Wells ship. He will be ending a 38-year career in education that began in Adams County and is ending just a few miles away in Wells County—and all served in small schools.
A Hoosier for the past 38 years, he started out as a Cornhusker.
Potter spent the first four years of his life on a farm near Holdrege, Neb. “They came in and built a big dam over our best property, forcing dad to make the choice of whether or not he wanted to go to another farm or do something else. So he went to work for Caterpillar Tractor in North Platte, Neb.,” said Potter.
“If we hadn’t have moved from where our farm was, by the time I was a senior, I would have graduated with three people. The class my senior year in high school graduated three people and two of them were my cousins,” said Potter.
“My experience with small schools is 20 kids in the high school. There was a basketball team I watched go all the way to the state finals in Class F where every boy in the high school played in the state championship game,” he added. “Now that’s a small school. They talk about small schools here, but they don’t know what small schools are. There are places out there that have figured out how to have good schools with a couple dozen kids in grades nine through twelve.”
But that didn’t turn out to be the case for Potter. When his family moved from the farm to North Platte, they moved to a town roughly the size of Marion with a high school roughly the same size.
“The high school I went to, I graduated with 500 kids. My experience with small schools growing up was through my cousins,” said Potter. “The school I went to was one of the largest in Nebraska. It worked well, but there were 300 kids in my class that I couldn’t call by name and I didn’t know half of the teachers.”
Subsequently, when Potter participated in sports at his school, he didn’t exactly stand out. He played on the football team, ran track, and the chess team, “But to start on the team you really had to be exceptionally talented in a school with 1,500 kids in three grades,” said Potter.
One place where he did excel was in music. “I was very active in the music program when I was in high school. I got involved in the high school choir,” said Potter, adding he was also in band.
“Choir was one area where I seemed to really excel. I got some leads in high school musicals. I was King Arthur in Camelot my senior year. I was a school board member in the Music Man my junior year (perhaps foreshadowing the future?) and when I was a sophomore I was a storm trooper in Sound of Music,” said Potter.
His journey toward Hooiserdom began with his sister, ***, who came to Taylor University at Upland following a visit by the youth group at the church the Potters attended. “The youth group came back and spread the good news about Taylor and soon we had a whole string of kids from our group who came out here,” said Potter.
“When I came out here to visit my sister, I really liked it, I liked the atmosphere,” said Potter. “And I wanted to get away from home. I just wanted to be on my own a thousand miles away from my parents.”
He picked the right place. “It was almost exactly a thousand miles from Upland to my front door at home,” Potter added.
Potter launched his academic career at Taylor as a math and music double major, but then switched to a music major and a math minor.
That was largely due to the influence of his high school choir director, whom Potter deeply admired. “He had a major impact on me and my confidence. He taught me so much about how to get things done and about practice work ethic, project orientation, and working with groups. That had a major influence on my decision to become a teacher.”
Although, Potter added, “I really didn’t even think about teaching until about my junior year. I thought maybe I would get involved with music performance, or take a church choir director’s job. Also, with the math I thought maybe I would enter some type of engineering program and do music on the side —but opportunities open up and interests change and I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I’ll try teaching.’”
Calculus Two also influenced his decision.
“It was a tough class for me,” recalled Potter with a chuckle. “I didn’t fail it, but I didn’t get an ‘A’ in it, and it wasn’t much fun. Anyway, I would have had to go another year to get a double major.”
Another matter that influenced Potter’s decision was he believed a math major would help him to get into the Air Force. Facing a possible draft in the summer of 1971 to the Vietnam War after his student deferrment expired, Potter was hoping to try and become a pilot.
“About the middle of my junior year, when they started the draft pool, I was working at the radio station at Taylor the night they drew the draft numbers. I was reading the UPI teletype live on the radio station. A number would come up and they would draw a date and put a number next to it. I ended up with a draft number of over 300,” said Potter.
Such a high number made it highly unlikely that Potter would ever be drafted.
“I was all prepared. I had already contacted the Air Force recruiters. After the draft number came up and the military was no longer a necessary option, I decided to try teaching,” he said.
Teachers at Taylor University also encouraged Potter to try teaching. “These were people I had a lot of respect for,” he said. An experience the fall of his senior year pushed Potter even more toward making teaching his career. Still, he wasn’t quite sure. He student taught at Woodlan High School and really enjoyed it. “I came out of there and thought to myself, ‘That was really nice.’ But I still wasn’t sure I weanted to do it for all of my career.”
He wanted to do some traveling and thought he had found the perfect solution that would allow him to travel and have contact with students.
Potter had done some traveling through Taylor’s music program and met a travel agent from Miami, Fla. He managed to line up a job with the agency after he graduated and had planned to take music groups around the world, working as a tour host to Europe and the Bahamas.
During the summer of his his junior and senior years he worked at Camp-of-the-Woods Christian Family Resort in upstate New York, north of Albany. It was there where Potter’s life took a permanent turn in a different direction.
“While I was working there—we didn’t have any phones out in the camping area—some kid come running down the beach shouting, ‘Hey Neil, there’s some guy from Bluffton, Indiana, calling you on the payphone. Well, that was the only phone the campers had out there. I went down there and picked it up. The guy on the other end was Kenny Payne, superintendent at Adams Central at the time. He lived in Bluffton and said he had gotten my name from somebody at Taylor and he wanted to know if I was interested in a teaching position,” said Potter.
He really wasn’t all that interested, and he told Payne of his plans to do some traveling. “He said, ‘Well, the first day of school we had a teacher resign because her husband got transferred and moved to California. We’ve had one day of school here and now we don’t have a choir director. So we started calling universities and everybody was already hired,” said Potter, again chuckling at the thought that he was one of Payne’s last resorts for landing a choir director.
“He told me that if I was interested at all to give him a call back. I told him I would think about it. So, I called him back and asked him if we could talk about it,” recalled Potter. “He told me to come to Bluffton and we could talk. I told him we have our last concert here at Lake-of-the-Woods about nine o’clock Saturday night and I would be there Sunday morning.”
Potter drove all night from upstate New York to Payne’s house on the east side of Bluffton.
“I knocked on his door about 9:30 a.m., walked in, sat down at his kitchen table, had a cup of coffee and we talked about two minutes. He then asked me, ‘Do you want the job? If you want it you can have it,’” recalled Potter.
His reply was he wanted to see the school, so Payne got ahold of the band director and arranged for a visit after church that afternoon. Potter took the tour and then drove all night back to upstate New York for choir rehearsal at Lake-of-the-Woods. “I’d sleep at rest areas. You know when you’re 20 you can do things like that,” said Potter.
That’s right. Potter was just 20 years old when he graduated from Taylor. He was still 20 when he accepted the position at Adams Central and moved—what would turn out to be permanantly—to Indiana.
“I told them I’d try it for a few years and I was going to go back to the travel business,” said Potter. That was the fall of 1971.
Every year for the next 17 years he would tell himself that he would teach one more year and then go back to traveling.
So what made him stay? “Oh I loved it. I just loved teaching choir. It was so rewarding.”
As his teaching career advanced, Potter saw that as a teacher, he could touch individual student’s lives, but as an administrator, he could impact many students’ lives, even those he did not reach directly by having them in his class. “I worked with a couple really good principles, too. Bob Shoup was my first middle school principal and taught me a lot my first years of teaching. Kenny Payne had such an influence on my life, too. I worked for a lot of good superintendents over there, too. Larry Roush and Doyle Lehman. Their impact helped me to decide that’s the way I wanted to go.”
So, he pursued a license to be a principal and superintendent and got it in 1975 from Indiana University.
Potter decided to pursue post-graduate studies while he was still single. The first seven years he taught, he was a bachelor and he got his masters and specialist degree by the time he was 26. “I moved to Bloomington all summer. I didn’t have a family, so I could do that,” he said, but he recalled, “There was one summer that I commuted to Bloomington from Berne four days a week. I had a girlfriend in Berne, so I got up every morning, drove all the way to Bloomington and came back every night. And that was before 69 was all done.”
The girl that Potter would eventually marry showed up in the hallways of Adams Central during Potter’s third year into teaching. She was a new teacher of English and her name was Connie Birdsall.
“We started to develop into a couple, and we decided that we couln’t develop a serious romance being down the hall from each other. Kids would go down and tell me everything she said and then go down and tell her everything I said. We decided if it was ever going to develop into anything, we had to be at different schools,” said Potter.
So Birdsall resigned and took an English job at Huntington North where she taught for three years.
To find a house halfway between their jobs, they moved from Berne to Markle. But that didn’t last long. Three years later they were expecting their first child. After the baby was born, Connie became a full-time mom. They moved back to Berne and continue to live in the house they bought together as a young married couple.
Together in that house they raised three children—Eric, Mark and Janet. Eric now lives and works in Fort Wayne and has three small children that Potter described as “the delight of my life,” Mark is in the television industry in Hollywood, Calif. and Janet is studying abroad in Ireland.
Toward the end of his music teaching career, he started to some curriculum coordinating and grant writing. When Ed Bryan retired as middle school principal, Potter was hired to fill the position—again without any formal interview—in the fall of 1988.
Even though he had advanced into a different position, Potter continued his grant writing and curriculum duties and also coordinated the first years at Adams Central under the state-imposed ISTEP tests.
“Well after 10 years as principal, I thought if I ever had plans to be a superintendent, I need to do it now. There were a few openings starting to develop,” said Potter.
One of those openings was at Southern Wells. Then Supt. Dr. Mike Bushong had accepted a position at a larger school corporation closer to his home, so he mentioned to Potter that his position was open.
Potter had been impressed by Southern Wells and the community, especially the way it came together after the huge fire that destroyed the elementary school in 1992. At Adams Central, he had been in charge of a student initiative to collect money for Southern Wells after the fire.
“I came over and presented Mike with some checks and was quite impressed with the Southern Wells Community,” said Potter. “By then I had also bought some farm acreage in Liberty Twp. and I was seeing some of the things that were going on over here.”
Being able to stay close to the students by having the superintendent’s office in the same building as the schools was also a draw for Potter. “It’s good when the superintendent is able to to recognize the kids and be able to call them by name and the kids know the superintendent by name and by face. I think there’s great value in that personal contact,” said Potter.
Members of the Southern Wells School Board saw Potter as a perfect fit for the school corporation and hired him in 1998. “I told them I wanted to work 10 years and then retire,” he said, adding that it has long been his goal to retire before the age of 60. He had seen too many people delay their retirement, only to die before they ever really got a chance to enjoy it.
“I made plans that way early on. My favorite first principal Bob Shoup when he was barely 66 turned his keys in there at Monroe, drove home, went out in the woods, started chopping wood and died. That had a real impact on me,” said Potter.
“It just seemed to me that the people who retired early lived a lot longer,” said Potter. He turns 59 this summer.
He doesn’t plan to sit around in his retirement. He’s operated a locksmith business for many years in Berne out of his house, but during his administrative years, he hasn’t devoted as much time to the work. “I’ve kept up my training. It’s really good to be able to do something with my hands. Maybe that’s the subconcious farm boy in me,” said Potter.
He also still owns a farm in Liberty Twp. “I grew up on a farm, my family was all farmers, it seemed like if you really wanted to be an adult, you had to have a farm,” said Potter, with a chuckle, adding, “It seemed like a good long-term investment.”
Potter and his wife are also building a summer cabin in Colorado about an hour and a half west of Colorado Springs near Buena Vista.
Mountains are a passion for Potter and hiking to the top of them is one of his hobbies. There are 54 mountains in Colorado over 14,000 feet tall. Potter has climbed 23 of them in the last 20 years. He plans to do all 54.
He also hopes to do some traveling with his daughter and see the end of the Tour de France bike race. He’s an avid bike rider himself riding on a regular basis with teachers who share a like interest and with a younger group in Berne.
He took up bike riding after a severe attack of arthritis. The long-term result is a bum ankle that left Potter with a limp. “But I found out that even when my legs were sore and my joints hurt, I could ride a bike. People say swim, but I’m not a good swimmer. Plus on a bike you can go places and see things. “
A typical bike ride for Potter is from Berne to Bluffton and back.
Potter has also been involved in the Fort Wayne Philharmonic chorus and he plans to get back into doing that again. He and Connie have also been active in the music ministry at First Missionary Church in Berne and plan to continue that. He hopes to be able to volunteer more at the church.
Plus Connie plans to continue working at her position as exective director of the Berne Chamber of Commerce.
He may also do some consulting work on a part-time basis.
Potter recalled his highlights as superintendent include winning the Class A state football championship in 2001. “That was not something I had much of an impact on, but it was just so much fun to watch that team and watch the community follow that team from sectional to regional to semi-state and then down to the dome. That was just a real feel good thing.
He counts the academic progress Southern Wells has made in the past 10 years as the most rewarding feature of his career. “The general and steady improvement of how the kids have been testing has been something really pleasing to see. And this year, the elementary school was moved by the state to “Exemplary” status. Our test scores are up significantly from when I came here. I can’t claim credit for that, but just to know that I have been part of a system that’s been able to steadily improve without any big gadgets—no quick-fix programs—just steady improvement in how kids are achieving,” said Potter.
He also counts as a highlight of his career working with former high school principal Jim Schwarzkopf and curriculum coordinator Pat Trant. Schwarzkopf retired two years ago and Trant is planning to retire this year. “They made a good team for us,” said Potter.
He added that he is really happy to have two high quality administrators at the elementary school and the high school. Brett Garrett is the princi-pal at the elementary school and Chad Yencer, a Southern Wells grad, is the principal at the high school. “They bring both experience and youth to the schools,” admitted Potter. “Being able to work with them and help support them has been a highlight for me.”
“But probably the best part of any day is being able to walk out my door and walk down the hallway into the classrooms and see the kids learning and growing, asking questions, knowing that they are learning in a room where the teacher cares about them, a teacher who knows all their names, knows who they are and knows their parents and even their grandparents,” said Potter.
“It’s great to be able to walk down that hallway and have some of those kids give me high fives and the little ones give me hugs. Or maybe they’ll stop by and tell me what happened in math class and tell me soething that someone said to them. It’s a highlight of everyday when I get out to the bus and have the kids tell me what happened that day. Sitting in this office with it’s little, teeny window is not that exciting but the good thing is, I can walk out that door and in two minutes I can talk to the people who are the reason why we’re here,” said Potter.
“That’s the real highlight of my day. Just seeing the kids. That’s what I’ll miss the most. There are some things about this job I won’t miss like fighting with the budget and trying to figure out how to keep all of the buses on the road with $4 a gallon diesel. But the kids, I’ll miss. I’ll miss seeing them get real excited about something going on in the classroom or some project they’re working on on the computer screeen. Watching that has been really rewarding”
He won’t miss the late night board meetings either, but he will miss working with some great board members. “We’ve had good school boards as long as I’ve been here,”
“I’ve really appreciated the opportunity to have been here at Southern Wells. I passed up opportunities to go elsewhere and looking back, if I had the chance, I would say I would do the exact same thing all over again,” he concluded.