Reid Shipley grew up in Walnut Hill, attended Raccoon Grade School K through 8, and did nearly everything else in Centralia. Church was in Centralia. Shopping was in Centralia. His mother's family was rooted there. Every ball game, every errand, every piece of the community his family needed — Centralia. By the time he arrived at Centralia High School as a freshman in 1986, he already knew half the kids walking through the door, even if he'd never technically been in class with them.

What he was thinking about was not academics. It was the orphan uniform. Football, basketball, track — all four years. The old Trout Gymnasium was packed so tight that the crowd felt like it was on top of you. "There's nothing like playing in Old Trout gym in front of a crowd screaming and yelling," he says. He graduated with the Class of 1990, having been part of something, without fully knowing what came next.

He went to Kaskaskia College on a basketball scholarship, helped the Blue Devils win a conference championship and reach the national tournament, earned his associate degree, and still — by his own account — had no plan. "I had no clue what I wanted to do." A guidance counselor at SIUE, where he continued on another basketball scholarship, eventually helped him narrow it down. He wanted to work with kids. Teaching. And since science teachers were harder to find than PE teachers or social studies teachers, he chose biology. "I wasn't super smart in science," he says, "but I was a good enough student that I could get my way through it."

When he finished at SIUE, Centralia High School happened to have an opening for a biology teacher. And an assistant football coaching position. And a track coaching position.

He went to the interview thinking: "Man, if anybody here ever remembers me, I'll never get this job."

He got the job.

Six years teaching. Multiple sports coached. A master's in educational administration begun, though his vision of the future still leaned more toward athletic director than principal's office. Then three years as assistant principal and basketball coach at Westville, where he did the soul-searching that settled it — administration was the path. When an assistant principal position opened at Centralia in 2004, he came home again. Four years later, he became principal.

Two-plus decades into leading the school, one of Reid's quieter points of pride sits in a hiring story his son Caleb brought home. Caleb works for Ameren, planning electrical infrastructure for new construction. When he interviewed, the hiring manager needed someone who could read blueprints. Caleb could. He'd learned in drafting classes at Centralia High School — dual credit with Kaskaskia College. The interviewer couldn't believe a high school offered that. "It was not the reason he got the job," Reid says, "but it was definitely an aspect where he had an advantage over some other people because he could already do some of the stuff that they were going to be trained on."

That story is also the argument Reid has made for twenty years. During an era when education pushed everyone toward four-year degrees and districts across Illinois quietly eliminated career programs to save money — through the hard proration years of 2012 through 2016, especially — Centralia kept its welding, auto, construction, culinary, drafting, family consumer sciences, and business classes intact. Alongside AP courses, honors sections, and upper-level chemistry and calculus. Two tracks, running parallel, are shaped to fit different students.

"If we think all of these kids come to school, can't wait to go sit in math and English class, we're crazy," he says at freshman orientation every year. You have to give kids a reason to be there. Once they're there, the academics follow.

Reid's wife, Shannon, teaches Family Consumer Sciences at CHS. Their son Ryan lives in Nashville, managing social media and design for a century-old family jewelry store. Caleb and his wife, Miranda, live about twenty minutes away in Carlyle with the family's first grandchild, eight months old and counting.

If he could sit down with himself as a freshman in 1986, he'd say two things. Study harder. And be careful — because everything you do and say in these halls is going to follow you. "One of these days, you're gonna be in charge of this place," he'd tell that kid. "Whether you think you are or not."

He could not have imagined it then.

He has spent most of his life there since.