Recently, I attended a teacher recruitment fair at a nearby college.  As I met with young, hopeful educators, they would ask me what makes Galesburg special, and in years past I would usually answer by bringing up our community support, certain programs, or our remodeled facilities. This year, I decided to answer differently. I pointed to people and highlighted their impact. The stories in this publication reflect this simple idea: go find the Silver Streaks who’ve built remarkable lives and ask them to tell us how they got there. What we discovered is something harder to quantify than a test score and more durable than any strategic plan. These are men and women shaped by the same hallways our current students walk, the same community rhythms many of you have known, the same unspoken expectation that when things get hard, you don’t give up on people.

Some of them left and found, to their own surprise, that Galesburg had followed them. A wildlife biologist working fourteen consecutive nights on a wildfire in North Carolina. A federal attorney navigating four presidential administrations from inside the Office of Management and Budget. A television journalist dispatched to Surfside at two in the morning who still says that what she learned here about belonging, about curiosity, about treating people with dignity, is what grounds her in a market that rarely slows down.

Others stayed, or came back, and built something from which the rest of us get to benefit. A third-generation business owner who has turned her own experience of hardship into a quiet philosophy about finding new paths in what looks like a dead end. A drummer who has given private lessons every consecutive year since 1976, while his father’s legacy still puts shoes on 400 children a year.

What unites them isn’t geography. It’s something closer to character; and character, as any educator will tell you, doesn’t happen by accident. It gets built, year by year, in schools like ours.

We are proud of what we teach here. We are prouder still of who these people have become.

We hope you find yourself in their stories…or find something in them that reminds you of someone you love.

With appreciation,

Dr. John Asplund
Superintendent, Galesburg CUSD 205