Robert Koehn's connection to Trico runs deeper than most and longer than all but a handful. He attended school in Ava — first through third grade, before his father bought a farm in the Gorham district — graduated from Gorham High School in 1969, came back to serve as Trico's principal from 1989 to 1997, and watched all three of his children graduate from the district. His grandchildren have followed. One graduated a few years ago. Another is in the graduating class of this year. The story of Robert Koehn and Trico is, in a quiet way, a story about what it means when a school district becomes the thread that connects generations of a community.

Getting to Trico's principal office took a winding path. After graduating from Gorham, Robert studied agriculture — specifically animal industries, the production of beef, swine, and poultry — at Southern Illinois University, graduating in 1973. For several years, he worked in various jobs while raising feeder pigs, until a phone call in February 1980 changed his direction. Gorham High School needed someone to cover classes for the rest of the school year and knew he had an agriculture degree. He said yes, finished out the year, and discovered something unexpected: he liked teaching. "I found out I really liked it," he says. He went back to SIU for the education core courses needed for certification, and what had started as a favor turned into a calling.

His teaching load at Gorham grew to include math and science alongside agriculture — a natural fit, since his graduate work in animal nutrition had required extensive coursework in chemistry, physics, and math. That breadth would serve him well later. Eventually, he pursued an administrative endorsement and took a one-year principal position at Galva High School, north of Peoria. The job was good. He would probably have stayed, he says, except the Trico opening appeared. It was back home. He applied, was hired, and arrived in 1989.

Those eight years at Trico coincided with one of education's most significant periods of reform. A Nation at Risk, the landmark federal report published in 1983, had put a spotlight on the weaknesses in American schooling. Illinois developed new academic standards in 1985, revised them again in 1995, and through all of it, building principals were the ones translating policy into practice. Robert arrived at Trico during the heart of this transition, and he took it seriously. "You really had to pay attention," he says. "There was a lot of change, and a lot of frustration, but they were trying to teach better."

His agricultural and scientific background gave him a distinctive perspective on the push — also coming from federal initiatives — to connect vocational education with core academic coursework. He worked to build bridges between shop teachers and math teachers, encouraging them to see what the other was doing. "The math teacher went down and visited the shop teacher and was amazed at the instrumentation being used," he recalls. That kind of cross-pollination was, for Robert, not a mandate to comply with but a problem he genuinely understood from both sides.

Among his proudest accomplishments was bringing Advanced Placement courses to Trico in four subject areas — English, calculus, chemistry, and physics. For a rural district, AP offerings represented a significant investment in academic ambition, and one that paid off in the doors it opened for students applying to college. He also oversaw the school's move from typewriters to computers, establishing a computer lab and computerizing the main office. He remembers his secretary's reaction to trading a Selectric memory typewriter for an Apple IIe with obvious fondness. And in his final year, 1997, the school won both the regional WYSE competition — a rigorous academic contest spanning science, math, English, and engineering — and the regional basketball tournament.

Robert left Trico for the superintendent position at DeSoto Grade School, then was elected regional superintendent of schools for Jackson and Perry counties, before eventually joining the Illinois prison system as a math teacher — a role he held until his full retirement in 2018. He still lives about ten miles from Ava, out in the country, on the Ava mailing route. When Gorham's district dissolved years ago, and parts of it merged into Trico, Robert found himself living in his old school's territory under his old school's name. He went home. He just took the long way around. "However, you would articulate that I came home," he says, "I did. But in a way, didn't. And then did."