Andrea Tanner can still remember the moment.

She was a nursing student with a single day scheduled to shadow a school nurse — one ordinary clinical experience that most students might have quickly forgotten. Andrea never forgot it.

"I absolutely loved every bit of what that nurse did," she recalled. The variety. The problem-solving. The web of relationships woven through a single school building. But more than anything, she recognized something she deeply valued in herself: a belief in promoting health and preventing illness rather than simply responding to it. That one-day shadow had a name, even if she didn't know it yet. It was a calling.

A 1998 graduate of Salem Community High School, Tanner began her journey in nearby Iuka, where she attended Iuka Grade School from kindergarten through eighth grade. In a small school with one class per grade level, there was nowhere to hide — and no reason to. Teachers knew their students' strengths, their struggles, and their families.

For Tanner, that environment proved formative in ways she still traces clearly. On her very first day of kindergarten, a classroom aide held up her coloring page — an apple, carefully stayed inside the lines — and used it as an example for the class. Something clicked. She discovered she liked being the standard. More importantly, she discovered that people believed she was capable of setting it.

That belief carried her into Salem Community High School, where she pushed herself into honors classes despite real uncertainty about whether she belonged there. "I'm so thankful that I did," she said. The decision placed her alongside peers who challenged and inspired her, shaping the academic confidence that would carry her through multiple degrees and a career built on sustained excellence.

Athletics were equally central. Tanner ran cross country and track — and she was a cheerleader, a combination that required extraordinary coordination among coaches and parents. In track, she was a sprinter, and not the comfortable kind. "I really wanted to be good at that 400," she said of the event most sprinters quietly avoid. "Not a lot of people loved that one." She loved it. Her dedication to track paid off: she believes her 800 medley relay team may still hold a school record.

The balancing act between cheerleading and cross country was real. On fall weekends, Tanner would cheer under the Friday night lights, then load into a car with her belongings, drive north to the Chicagoland area, spend the night in a hotel, and join her cross-country teammates the next morning for a meet. It took a village — supportive parents, flexible coaches, and the kind of community that treats a kid's ambitions as worth the trouble. That spirit of collaboration helped earn her recognition as an Illinois High School Association Academic All-State Team member, an honor that recognized excellence in both academics and athletics.

After graduation, Tanner earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Murray State University. A brief stint as a pediatric oncology nurse led her across the river to Floyd County, Indiana, where two school nurses were retiring, and a district was hiring. She applied despite being brand new to the profession, got the job, and fell completely in love with it. One year later, she returned to school for a master's degree in school health and public health. Eventually came a doctorate, a faculty appointment, and a career that now reaches far beyond any single school building.

Today, Tanner serves as an assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington, where roughly forty percent of her time is devoted to research focused on student mental health and the unique role school nurses play in it. Her work has brought her into collaboration with the National Association of School Nurses and introduced her to national thought leaders who have opened doors she never anticipated. The thread running through all of it is her conviction that school nurses are among the most misunderstood professionals in education.

"They really can be a great convener for any of the resources that a student may need," she said. The nurse's office, she points out, is one of the only places in a school building entirely free of disciplinary association — a stigma-free zone where students can simply raise their hand and access support from the school nurse without having to explain themselves to anyone else. That's not a small thing. It's where students sometimes share what they've shared with no one else.

Tanner married her high school sweetheart, Chris Tanner, Jr. — a fellow member of Salem's Class of 1998, whom she credits, with characteristic warmth, as her study partner through senior year. Together they have raised three children — Noah, Micah, and Grace — and opened their home to eleven foster children over the years.

When she describes Salem to people in Bloomington, she doesn't reach for geography.

"I am who I am because of that village," she said. And through her research, her teaching, and her advocacy for school nurses across the country, Andrea Tanner is quietly helping build those same kinds of villages for students she may never even meet.