Every community tells a story about itself through the people it produces.

This issue of Stories and Stripes is ours.

Over the past several months, our team had the privilege of sitting down with Herrin alumni whose graduation years span nearly five decades — from Tina Simpson, who walked across that stage in 1973, to Jaylan Blake, who graduated just a few years ago in 2021. What they found wasn't a collection of success stories that happened despite Herrin. They found stories that happened because of it.

You'll read about Joe Helleny, who called himself a "geek, dork" in high school, scored exactly one career point in basketball, and went on to build CourtMoney into a company serving municipalities across the country. You'll read about Shane Chaney, who sat down with Coach Byron Keener as a junior, admitted he liked math, and eventually managed payroll for more than a thousand employees across multiple states. You'll read about Robyn Adams, who sprained her ankle playing basketball, watched how a physical therapist approached her recovery, and spent the next thirty years building a rehabilitation program that now serves patients across Southern Illinois — including, eventually, the very therapist who first inspired her.

And you'll read about Verna Webb, who has spent decades quietly making sure that people with developmental disabilities in our region get to live full, joyful, self-directed lives — their directions, as she puts it.

What strikes me most, reading these stories together, is how often a teacher, a coach, or a counselor appears at exactly the right moment. Coach Jilek driving Robyn to the hospital. Coach Keener suggesting accounting. A counselor working with Tina's mother to make sure she took the right classes for college. These moments may have seemed ordinary at the time. They weren't.

That is what this community does. It shows up for its young people, quietly and consistently, in ways they often don't recognize until they're decades down the road and someone asks them to look back.

Ally Sylvestre put it simply: every choice that you make, it follows you.

What Herrin does — what this school system does — is try to make sure the choices our students encounter are worthy ones. We are proud of every alumnus in these pages. We are proud of the community that shaped them. And we are grateful that they came home, in these conversations, to tell us so.

Welcome to our alumni issue.

Nathaniel Wilson Superintendent, Herrin CUSD 4