Danielle Hatfield walks the halls of Benton Grade School every morning, checking some things most people never think about: whether the bathrooms have toilet paper and whether anything on the playground broke overnight. It is a small, unglamorous piece of a much bigger job. Hatfield is in her second year as K4 assistant principal, and after sixteen years in the classroom, she has learned that leadership often looks less like a title and more like quietly making sure everything works before the kids walk in.

Hatfield grew up in Benton and graduated from the district's high school in 2005, one more name in a long list of graduates who came back to teach where they were once students themselves. People still ask if her married name ties her to the famous feuding family, a question she gets constantly and cannot actually answer. "My husband doesn't know either," she said.

She spent two years at Rend Lake College before finishing her degree at Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2009, student teaching fourth grade in Bluford through an evening program built for people already working full time, since she was managing a McDonald's in Benton at the time. She met her husband, Josh, who is from the south side of Chicago and moved to the Ina/Woodlawn area as a child, through mutual friends during those college years.

Her start at Benton took an unexpected turn. She had interviewed for a kindergarten position and did not get it, only to be called weeks later about an extended substitute role covering her own former third-grade teacher, who had gone on medical leave. She remained the extended substitute for the school year, then took over the classroom permanently for the next 14 years before trying a year of sixth grade language arts.

When the assistant principal job opened, Hatfield was not chasing it as a lifelong goal. "These are my people, this is my town," she said of what ultimately pulled her toward applying. Benton splits discipline duties between two assistant principals, one for kindergarten through fourth grade and one for fifth through eighth, while the principal oversees the building as a whole.

Discipline, somewhat surprisingly, has become one of her favorite parts of the job. She sees behavior as communication, often signaling a need that isn't being met.  She has found that guiding a struggling student through that kind of moment feels remarkably similar to the light bulb moments she chased as a teacher. Raising her own son, six-year-old Max, has sharpened that perspective further. She tries to remind parents in tough conversations that she understands exactly what their child means to them, even while explaining there is work to do.

This year brought a new set of responsibilities in curriculum and instruction, including helping roll out a new K through eighth reading strategy and evaluating every new teacher in the building. She approaches evaluations as a collaborator rather than a critic, sitting in as a friendly observer and then talking through what worked and what might work better, the same instinct that made her an unofficial team leader back when she was still teaching third grade.

Colleagues describe her as someone who drops everything to help, a reputation cemented when a friend handed her a sticker at a staff gathering featuring Mrs. Doubtfire's line, "I'm on my way, dearie," because that was supposedly her all last year, every time her phone rang. She still considers herself a servant leader first. She describes her approach simply: “I work for them. They don't work for me.”

To stay connected to what she loved most about teaching, Hatfield recently started asking teachers if she can borrow their classrooms for fifteen minutes to read aloud, giving them a short break while she gets to be silly with a picture book instead of a disciplinarian. Between that, the new reading strategy, and a new behavior incentive program down in K4, she has decided that is enough new territory for one year. Her goal now is sustainability, doing the job well without losing time with Max, who loves math, drawing, and playing with Mario and Minecraft with his dad.

At a funeral not long ago, a retired teacher asked Hatfield how it felt being top dog these days. Her answer came quickly. “Oh, no, I'm at the bottom,” she told him. “I work for them. They don't work for me.”