The van was parked behind the school and plugged into an outlet.

That detail — so specific, so plainly unglamorous — is actually the best summary of how Joan B. Floyd spent the first chapter of her career at Meridian. The van belonged to a grant program called Project Action, and when Joan arrived here in 1971, it served two purposes: it drove counselors out into communities to find students who had stopped coming to school, and it served as a counseling space when those students needed somewhere to talk that wasn't the principal's office.

"We had counseling sessions in them," she said. "I was a counselor, and it was with dropouts — to get them back in school."

The program served both Meridian and Egyptian School Districts, operating out of an office in Mounds. Counselors were given names by the schools — students who had disappeared from attendance rolls — and went looking for them.

High-risk markers were specific: chronic absenteeism, behavioral history, disciplinary patterns, and suspensions. Mr. Shaner, the guidance counselor at the time, filtered referrals from teachers to Joan. She worked the cases that had the most distance to close.

When students were ready, they joined group counseling sessions — organized carefully by fit. Some groups were all girls, some all boys, some mixed. The composition mattered. Peer dynamics could either accelerate trust or destroy it.

Parent groups ran in the evenings, refreshments included. And those sessions often unlocked what individual counseling couldn't. "A lot of times," Joan said, "we found out things the child wouldn't tell us." Bullying, fear, shame — the reasons kids stopped coming rarely announced themselves. They had to be uncovered together, by people willing to show up and keep asking.

"We had a very high success rate," she said. "It was teamwork."

Joan spent more than thirty years at Meridian in total, from 1971 until around 2001. Her role evolved as the district evolved. Project Action gave way to a guidance counselor position at the junior high. When a new elementary school was built, she became an elementary counselor. As funding constraints tightened and staff were cut, she added health education to her duties — a state graduation requirement she was certified to teach — splitting her days between the elementary and the high school buildings, half and half.

Whatever students needed. That was the job.

She was raised in Pulaski, Illinois — farm country, on both sides of her family — and attended grade school there before graduating from Douglas High School in Mounds around 1961 or 1962. She knows this region the way you only know a place you've never really left. Her son and daughter both graduated from Meridian High School. She counseled students in the same halls where her own children learned.

"I see kids now that I taught their grandparents," she said.

She also taught at Shawnee College during her career — a fact that surfaced late in the conversation when the interviewer mentioned Christopher Jackson, the actor who plays George Washington in Hamilton and was for years Broadway's longest-running Simba. Joan didn't know Christopher, but she knew someone who did. His father had been in one of her classes at Shawnee.

In a region where the same families keep cycling through the same institutions across generations, that kind of connection is less surprising than it sounds. It's just how the roots grow here.

Now retired, Joan still participates in the district's strategic planning process — sessions that she says carry unusual energy because they were genuinely open to the community. "You want the community to know you're interested in what they think," she said. "Something they actually helped develop." Over twenty people showed up to the first session.

Walking the renovated hallways after the interview, she paused to look at what the building had become. "It's such a good atmosphere for the children," she said.

The district has been remodeled. The old school she knew is gone. The van is long since gone. But what was built inside both of them — the belief that students are worth finding, worth sitting with, worth bringing back — is harder to knock down.

"Sometimes the results, you don't see it," she said. "But it happens out in the world."

Then: "Hopefully you have helped somebody along the way. Save a few souls, maybe."

Three decades of getting in the van. That seems about right.