Dear Centralia Community,

There is a line in one of the stories in this issue that has stayed with me since I first read it. Keith Kessler's in-laws have a saying they've repeated for years: It all comes back to Centralia. They mean it literally — there is always a connection, always a thread that ties the people in this community to one another across time and distance. Reading the stories gathered here, I believe it completely.

This is our summer alumni issue, and I want to tell you what it means to me.

The people in these pages left Centralia — some eagerly, some reluctantly, some without a clear plan in any direction. Dustin Foutch has led a school district. Kaasha Benjamin practiced law in three states. Malaya Downey is changing communities in ways that began where she grew up in northeast Centralia. Tom Siegler took the long way around — three colleges, one semester behind schedule — and ended up exactly where he needed to be. What strikes me in every story is not the distance these graduates traveled, but what they carried with them when they went.

They carried their teachers. Oletta Klein, who brought Maria Pryor out of her shell. Gale Clinton, who made mathematics genuinely interesting. Sue Settle, who told Kaasha Benjamin she belonged at Northwestern University and kept pushing until she believed it. Reuben Hill and Coach Katrina Johnson, who built something in Kylie Gorman she's still drawing on today. These names appear in our graduates' stories decades later — not as footnotes, but as foundations.

They carried this community's particular quality of knowing people. Karen Brothers was literally passed around to teachers' and coaches' homes when her father was hospitalized. Reid Shipley walked into a job interview convinced that anyone who remembered him wouldn't hire him. He got the job. He's been here ever since.

And many of them came back. Or kept coming back. Or never quite left, even when their address changed.

That is what I am most proud of when I think about Centralia High School. Not a building or a record or a ranking — though we are proud of all of those things too — but the particular warmth this community plants in people. The kind that travels.

Every fall, new students walk through our doors. These pages are a reminder of where those doors can lead — and of who will be waiting to walk alongside them.

It is an honor to serve this community.

Dr. Chuck Lane
Superintendent, Centralia High School District 200