Maria Pryor would tell you, unprompted, that she is not someone who loves to be in the spotlight. This interview, she admitted at the outset, made her uncomfortable. She agreed to it anyway — because she is, as she also put it, a participative person.

That tension has defined a lot of her life.

A member of the Centralia High School Class of 1996, Pryor describes her younger self as a floater. No strong fixed group of friends. No drama, no enemies — just someone who moved quietly through the hallways, content not to be noticed. Anxious about the future in the specific way of someone who wants things to go the way they're supposed to go, and worries when she can't see how they will.

Then she walked into Oletta Klein's speech class.

Klein had a gift — a way of bringing students forward without making them feel exposed. There was freedom in her classroom, Pryor says. A respectful freedom. And something happened in there that Pryor hadn't expected. "She really brought me out of my shell," she says. For the first time, she felt genuinely seen. Successful in a way that surprised her.

That experience sent her to Kaskaskia College and then to SIUE, where she earned a degree in speech communication with a minor in psychology. She was going to be a speech teacher. She was going to do for students what Klein had done for her.

Five months after graduating, she married Kevin — a fellow Class of '96 orphan she'd known in high school. Three sons came: William, Myles, and Nolan. She worked at a preschool. She kept moving forward without always knowing exactly where she was headed.

In July 2009, St. Mary School hired her to teach its first-ever Pre-K-3 class. She was an alumna of the school herself. Her sons would all attend. "It's kind of home for me," she says. She earned her master's in education from Greenville University, taught across multiple grade levels for over seventeen years, and then the principal position opened.

She wasn't pursuing it. "The job kind of sought me," she says. She went back to SIUE for her principal licensure anyway and stepped into the role. Five years in, she is leading the school that first shaped her.

William — Will — now works for C. Hill Civil Contracting in Centralia and is preparing to move to Breese. Myles is a junior at Greenville University studying secondary education. Nolan just walked across the Centralia High School graduation stage, an elbow injury from the second game of this baseball season postponing, but not derailing, his plans to join the heavy machine operators union apprenticeship.

When Maria talks about Centralia, she doesn't reach for landmarks or accomplishments. She reaches for the specific weight of home: "It's where I was raised. It's where my grandparents are buried. My parents still live here." And then she says something quieter and more precise — that when your children are grown, and they come back and say I'm home, you feel like you've done something right by staying.

She's been the principal of a Catholic school. She has managed budgets and faculty, and curriculum. But she'll tell you what the work actually is: being part of each family's tribe. Getting inside the lives of the children who walk through those doors and their parents who trust you with them. That's the inheritance from Oletta Klein — not a technique, but a way of seeing people.

If she could sit with her sophomore self today, the floater who worried about everything and wanted to be invisible, she'd keep it simple: "Allow and embrace what life throws at you." Take the changes as they come. Stop stealing happiness from yourself with worry.

"I wouldn't be where I am today," she says — in a place that fulfills her, challenges her, makes her part of something far bigger than herself.

She knows exactly where she is.