LE A N I N G I N TO PU R PO SE
Leaning into Purpose with Nebraska Administrators: Dr. Mike Lucas and Jason Alexander By Tyler Dahlgren, NCSA Communications Manager
This is the third of four installments of “Leaning into Purpose”, a series of sit-down conversations moderated by NCSA Communications Manager Tyler Dahlgren and ESU 5 Mental Health and Wellness Director Jen McNally with a revolving guest list of Nebraska administrators from rural and metropolitan districts across the state. We’ll jump into purpose, reflect on virtuous careers, and celebrate the administrators who make Nebraska’s schools so special. It was a simple black and white pencil box, a serviceable yet entirely unspectacular piece of cardboard lugged off to school by thousands of students each day. But for a 6th grade student named Jason Alexander, that pencil box was a life-changer. His aunt, a ALEXANDER teacher, spoke glowingly about her profession and his father, a state patrolman, would talk about how he missed the boat, about how he wished he would have become a teacher. It was in the 6th grade, the
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NCSA TODAY SUMMER 2022
pencil box days you could call them, when Alexander made up his mind on what he wanted to grow up and be. “I knew I wanted to be a teacher,” he says without a trace of doubt nor regret. “I had great teachers. I had great coaching, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do.” He kept that pencil box, not as a reminder of who he was, but as a symbol for who he was going to be. It was sturdy, just like his aspirations, and when Alexander stepped to the head of his first classroom (6th graders, ironically enough), the pencil box sat on his desk. “I sat it on my desk that first day and said to my students, ‘If you ever need somebody to talk to, or if you ever have a question, you put it in this pencil box, and I will be there for you,’” Alexander remembers. The pencil box is likely worn now, its exterior more banged up now than it was then, but its significance hasn’t waned for Alexander, now the Superintendent of Beatrice Public Schools. It probably never will. *** It was a simple conversation between an accounting major from Florida and a professor named Olive Burns in the education offices at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.
