Debra Einhorn graduated from Newton High School, went to the University of Illinois intending to be a civil engineer, and ended up in speech pathology because the computer lab gave her headaches. The rooms were dark. She got migraines. She looked for another option within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and found Speech and Language. "I just fell into it."

That stumble into a different corridor has now lasted 35 years.

Deb was born and raised in Newton, went to kindergarten through eighth grade in this very building, and has spent her career moving through every corner of the district — all eleven buildings the system once comprised before consolidation brought it down to three. Her first full year, the other SLP went on sabbatical, and Deb covered ten schools alone, loading up her car each morning and starting her circuit at Grove. She worked at St. Thomas when her own children attended. One of the district's early consolidated-out schools was Rose Hill — which is where her father went to school as a boy. "Now I'm teaching in the school my dad went to," she remembered.

Her job description surprises people. Most assume speech pathology is about helping kids say sounds correctly. The sounds are part of it. "We also have the language portion. We teach kids how to understand concepts, follow directions, understand what they're reading, and what they're hearing. If it's just a matter of saying hi in the hallway, we work on that as well." The students she's most drawn to are those with autism, where communication barriers are steepest, and the wins are hardest won. "When those kids learn a skill, I'm proud for them."

In the years since screens multiplied and behavior challenges increased, her speech room has stayed relatively constant — grounded in standards, low on technology, high on repetition. "I'm a drill-at-the-table type of person." She said it without apology, because the results speak.

One moment, she still carries: a student she worked with on her R sounds eventually walked to the podium as valedictorian. "Her mom was standing there and said, 'I never thought she'd be able to get up and give that speech with that R problem. And she said thank you.'" Deb absorbed the moment and moved on. "To me, that's just part of the job."

She has five children, all of whom came through Jasper County Schools. All five names start with D — a pattern that began with her father Doyle, continued with her first husband Donald, and became intentional when Donovan was born, and the theme was too good to abandon.

Donovan earned his PhD in microbiology from the University of Georgia in December. Devin is an electrical computer science engineer for Boeing, commuting from Edwardsville to Hazelwood, Missouri. Currently working on his master's degree, because he's not about to let his sister one-up him. Dalton is a mechanical and field engineer for PRI Reclaiming Systems in Dupo, the only one of the five who's married so far. Danae has her master's in electrical engineering from SIUC and is now pursuing her PhD in robotics at UC Berkeley — her dream is to become a professor at the University of Illinois. She had a paper accepted at the American Controls Conference and was nominated for an NSF research grant before the program was eliminated. She got an honorable mention. "Take it for what it is," Deb said — then kept going.

Dryden, the youngest, and her child with her second husband, is still at SIU. He works at Menards and has been gently discouraging Deb from her stated post-retirement plan of working there alongside him. "Mom, you wouldn't be able to handle it."

The story of those five children contains some hard passages. Deb's first husband died when the four oldest were ages 4, 3, 2, and 28 days. She found her way through, and eventually remarried — a man who also grew up in Jasper County and who had lost his own father at five years old. He felt that helping raise her children was his way of giving back. Deb gives this job credit for holding her steady through those years. "This job allowed me to spend a lot of time with them."

Her description of why Newton produces the kinds of people it does: "A lot of people have never heard of Newton, Illinois. But I think our kids are set apart because their values are different." Family at the games. Faith woven in from the beginning. A community that notices.

She's retiring, and she doesn't know what comes next. She plans to build a porch. She programmed singing Christmas lights for her front yard — her daughter helped with the code. She loves to mow, to garden. She doesn't like to fly, but she learned there's a train from St. Louis to Berkeley, and she's considering it. She won't surrender her SLP certification for a while. She has a lot to offer — 35 years of it. "I have all this information. And I hate to think it might just go to waste."

She won't let it.