Joan Gordon reflects on 42 years of East Union

Joan Gordon’s office is located in the southwest corner of the East Union school building. The building contains both the elementary and middle-high school, which has not always been the case in the 42 years Gordon has worked in the district.

Out the elementary principal’s window, she can see the school’s flagpole, the elementary drop-off and a playground, one that she helped build. Remnants of projects Gordon helped oversee are throughout the entire building, including the elementary gym with a large mural of an eagle on the other side of the building.

When Gordon arrived at school on May 1, her last month during normal school hours at East Union, she caught her staff hanging small posters in the hallways. These small posters, colored by students, contained retirement tributes from her student body. She had no idea.

“I need to bind them up in a book, but it was pretty special and pretty fun,” Gordon later told the East Union school board. “I didn’t put my favorite one up there, but I’m going to tell you about it. There’s a fifth grader who wrote, ‘When you retire you can relax and you can drink anything you want to.’ Another one, ‘You can ride your motorcycle to the mall and get coffee.’ That sounds pretty good too.”

As Gordon looks forward to spending more time on the family farm and visiting her grandson and other family in northern Iowa, she reflected on her time at East Union, from 20 years teaching to 22 years as elementary principal.

Before East Union was a union

In 1984 (when Prince’s “When Doves Cry” was on the top Billboard charts), Gordon first arrived in the district as a teacher for Arispe. Elementary students were spread out across multiple buildings in Lorimor, Arispe and Afton.

Ten years later, East Union chose to close these auxillary buildings and begin work on completing an extension to the high school building which would incorporate a new elementary school wing. Beginning in 1994, modular buildings were constructed.

“We moved into modulars, which sat out on that playground,” Gordon said, pointing at the playground outside her office window. “Here, I’m actually looking into my old classroom window. I always joke and say, if that were still there, I’d be looking into that window.”

Temporary classrooms were constructed on the Union County Fairgrounds, including the preschool. The fairgrounds would also be the place where an East Union staple would be created.

“I don’t know how many people remember that, but that is where our preschool was located in a building that no longer exists at the fairgrounds, and we shared that with what’s now ASPIRE More,” Gordon said.

Over decades of progress, including after Gordon became principal in 2004, work on the final school building continued. For the 2011-12 school year, East Union finally moved out of modulars into the main school building.

A year prior though, Gordon had to handle transitioning about 150 students between second through fifth grade out of modulars and into temporary classrooms due to a change in construction plans.

“We had less than three weeks to figure out where to put everybody,” Gordon said. “We just packed them into rooms that were big enough. The middle school gave up two classes for our fifth grade, one for each class. Then the music room, we combined our two fourth grade classes because they were the smallest and those two teachers shared the larger music room for a year and a half. That is how we lived.”

It was tough on teachers and other staff members.

“Our Title I special ed TAG teachers, we found little office spaces, and I kid you not, our speech clinician from the AEA, she was in a closet,” Gordon said. “I cleaned that out and tried to make it as nice as like, but it was a coat closet.”

A common theme of Gordon’s reflections were listing community members who helped with any transitions the school would be going through. Gordon made it clear East Union isn’t just an elementary school; it is a community.

“It wasn’t just the elementary teachers there helping us move,” Gordon said. “Secondary teachers and community people showed up to help us move. I mean, I can’t even begin to thank those people for helping us.”

The community would prove essential during another challenging period for East Union.

COVID

In March 2020, when kids went home on spring break across the U.S., they were told to stay home for an extra week. Then the rest of the month. Then the rest of the school year.

Across the nation, 55 million students were quarantined during the COVID-19 pandemic, and schools had to adapt quickly to a new age when the future was deeply uncertain.

“Those two weeks were like holding your breath,” Gordon said. “You just didn’t know what was going to happen and then when the decision was made to end the school year — Ken Casper was our superintendent at the time and he, thank goodness, had lots of experience and was very good at reading the needs of the community. The very first thing that we did was make sure our families were fed."

Gordon took on the help of tech-savvy staff members, such as Robin McNutt and Marcus Patten, to take on the challenge. Through a lot of self-training, East Union wasn’t going to drop education for their quarantined students.

“I taught myself how to build Google Sites and I built a website and of course Zoom meetings, the whole realm of all of this technology I remember,” Gordon said.

“We checked out Chrome laptops, we checked out hotspots, Lori Paup, our technology coordinator, was another one who didn’t get to sleep or go home for five months. I’m kidding, but I mean she is fantastic about it. I could go into so many details about this, but we did not let instruction of our kids drop.”

Even when Iowa schools began returning to in-person classes at the following semester, East Union prepared and implementing masking, distancing, cleaning and online teaching through Google Classroom.

“It was a huge undertaking in our little school, but once again, it takes you back to every single person that works for this school at that time they stepped up and did more than what was expected and made it work and we made it,” Gordon said.

Four-day school week

In recent years, the biggest change within East Union was the districtwide decision to swap to a four-day week schedule. Part of the reason behind the decision was to help entice staff members to stay at the district, which East Union has seen since the schedule was implemented during the 2024-25 school year.

Gordon said she received feedback and worked to act on any negative side effects of the transition. By far the biggest community concern was childcare during the day of the week now missing from the schedule. Quickly, the school created a Monday daycare option at an inexpensive cost.

Through staff feedback and working with Superintendent Tim Kuehl, Gordon moved through the transition constantly looking at ways to improve her school. Sometimes, difficult decisions had to be made.

“I don’t like to tell people I care about that I can’t do something for them,” Gordon said. “When the board made the decision, we made it work.”

Staff and community

An interest in technology began even before the pandemic, with Gordon writing grants to help make East Union a model computer science school. Today, East Union Elementary students receive computer science learning. Fourth and fifth graders receive instruction daily, and K-3 receive instruction on an alternating schedule.

Through teachers like McNutt and Patten, East Union received grants which allowed the school to purchase equipment like drones, 3D printers and battery-powered vehicles.

When playgrounds were being built at East Union, more grants were written. Now, a west and north playground funded through grants are there for children to play.

The grants often only covered the cost of materials. When it came time to install them, it was the community who stepped up, including Gordon’s own family.

“I had some awesome community friends and great people on the staff that they were willing to come in the summer and help get this accomplished,” Gordon said. “It was 2007 when we got [the north playground] installed, but I have to say my husband — who’s a lifelong farmer — he brought equipment over, he and Mike Rawlings, they were friends from way back and he was on our school board. They went out there and dug the pit."

A similar experience played out with the west playground, just outside Gordon’s window. First it was South Central Iowa Community Foundation grants, which added basketball courts and tetherball poles. Then, when it came time for the rest of the playground, a new problem emerged.

“We had 4 inches of rain the day before all the volunteers were supposed to come,” Gordon said. “Mike [Nelson] rented a pump and pumped out the holes that were already dug and Steve Kenyon was laying on his stomach scooping mud out. I think I’ve got pictures of him laying on his stomach, scooping mud out of the holes.”

Those memories have stuck with Gordon. As she watched her students play on the playground for the first time, there’s a certain pride which emerges in overcoming every challenge presented.

“After it was all done and the kids were all playing on it, it was great, but it was a series of problems to solve,” Gordon said. “You have a project; there’s always something that’s going to go wrong.”

No matter the challenge, Gordon has had her community by her side.

“That’s seriously why I stick around so long; it’s the people,” Gordon said. “It’s a great place to be.”

While teaching, Gordon always wanted to kids to have respect for themselves and each other.

“As a teacher, I always try to be very fair with my students and treat everybody — you can’t say treat everybody the same because everybody has different needs — but treat everybody fairly," Gordon said. “How do you spread that across an entire school? How do you instill that sense of respect and fairness across kindergarten through fifth grade? You treat their teachers right.

“They see you respecting the teachers and expecting them to respect the teachers. These are the people who are taking care of you. Not just your teachers; everybody who’s collecting an East Union paycheck is someone taking care of you.”

When asked what her final send-off to East Union would be, Gordon focused on what she felt when she first started teaching in the district.

“The moment I moved to this community, I was welcomed simply because I was here,” Gordon said. “I didn’t have to earn my way in. The community welcomes you and takes you in as its own and that is still true 42 years later. East Union is just a special place and people in this school tend to be committed to not only building themselves up and building each other up and that’s not me. That’s the culture of the school and the community.”