Tom Siegler graduated from Centralia High School in 2000, intending to be an engineer. He enrolled at the University of Illinois in mechanical engineering, realized it was too big, didn't flunk out — he wants to be clear about that — and came home after his freshman year to figure things out at Kaskaskia College.

By his own accounting: three colleges, one semester behind schedule.

Back in Centralia, he started helping a friend's father coach a junior football team through the Centralia Youth Football League. That led somewhere he hadn't expected. He liked working with kids. He'd always liked math. And he remembered a teacher at CHS — Gail Clinton, a self-described math nerd — who made the subject genuinely interesting. By the time he transferred to SIU Edwardsville for his junior year, he had a direction: mathematics education. He graduated in December 2004, walked into the main office at Centralia High School to get on the substitute list, and was asked if he could start that same day.

He could.

Four veteran teachers retired that year. He was hired for the 2005–06 school year — one year in the old building, the same classrooms where he'd been a student, before the move to the new campus. He taught math and coached football for six years. Then a colleague mentioned he was going back for a master's in administration. Tom thought: no kids yet, newly married, probably now or never. He went too. "I didn't have a lot of plans to use it," he says.

When two assistant principal positions opened at CHS in 2011, he talked to Chuck Lane and Reid Shipley. "They didn't tell me don't apply," he says. "That is a good sign." He applied. He got the job. Six years as assistant principal, then the superintendent's endorsement from Eastern Illinois University — again with a cohort, again because colleagues were going, again without a firm plan to use it.

In 2017, Bartelso Grade School had an opening. He applied. He got it. Nine years later, he's still there — superintendent, principal, and math teacher, all at once, for a school of roughly 150 kids in Clinton County. The building is leased from the Catholic church next door, which runs PSR classes there in the mornings before school. He stands at the front door every day when the buses arrive and says good morning. He gives kids a hard time. They like it.

He still teaches an eighth-grade math class every day. He tells those students something early: "You're probably gonna get the first B of your life in here, and it's gonna be okay." Then he tells them he doesn't know what he got in eighth-grade math either, because it doesn't matter.

What matters, in his telling, is the relationship between talent and work — and most kids get it backwards. "You are born with a certain amount of talent," he tells his daughters, his students, anyone who'll listen. "It's not your fault. It's also not to your credit. It's only going to take you so far. And then you have to put in the work. If you wait until your talent runs out before you start putting work in, you're never going to get to your highest level."

He grew up in Centralia with a father who was born and raised there, played rec sports he admits he wasn't very good at, went through the public schools, and found his niche in football and in the company of teachers he now realizes were quietly exceptional. Gail Clinton. Others he still keeps in contact with. Some still working at the school.

His wife teaches seventh-grade English at Centralia Junior High. Their older daughter is a CHS sophomore — soccer, golf, student council, FFA, FCA. Their younger one is in sixth grade and trying to schedule equally in all directions. Between the two of them, he says, the family calendar doesn't stay empty long.

His measure of success as a superintendent is not complicated. "I hope maybe when I retire one day, I've made one kid's life a little bit better," he says. "If I've done that for one kid, then it was time well spent."

Three colleges. One semester behind. Right where he needs to be.