Eric and Emily Brummer grew up eight miles apart and didn't know each other existed.

He was a Teutopolis kid, raised on a family farm. She was from Newton, just across the Jasper County line. It took a hundred-mile detour—Emily at SIU Edwardsville, Eric already out of college and visiting with friends one night—for the two of them to finally cross paths.

"We had to go a hundred miles away to meet each other," Emily says, laughing.

Seven children later, they're back where it all started. Eric farms the same land where he grew up, living in the same house where he was raised. Emily, a registered nurse, works part-time. Between them they manage a household that stretches from college to second grade: Melissa, Megan, Rachel, Rosella, Alex, Audrey, and Adam.

How do they keep it all straight?

"It's called a dry-erase calendar," Emily says. "That's easily changed."

Eric's philosophy is even simpler: "You just let it flow."

But beneath the cheerful chaos is a family that has leaned heavily on what Teutopolis schools offer—and watched those opportunities shape each child differently.

The clearest example is the CORE program—Creating Opportunities for Regional Employment—which rotates students through local businesses over ten weeks, teaching them to build a résumé, interview, and see how different careers actually work.

"If you're a sixteen-year-old kid and you don't know what to do with your life," Emily says, "that's a great way to kind of narrow things down."

Their three oldest daughters all took CORE. For Megan, it was a turning point. She saw a range of industries during her junior year, gravitated toward healthcare, and enrolled in health occupations her senior year to explore different avenues within the field. Today she's studying nursing at SIU Edwardsville. Her mother, the RN, wasn't surprised.

Melissa had the opposite reaction. Same CORE class, immediate conclusion: "No, healthcare is not for me." She's now studying horticulture at Lake Land College and plans to transfer to SIU Carbondale. Same program, same family, two entirely different outcomes—which is exactly the point.

When the oldest two took CORE, sessions were held at various locations including the Dieterich Bank Corporation office. Now there's a dedicated Effingham Technology Center. The infrastructure is catching up to the ambition.

The family's four oldest children are also involved in FFA—a program that didn't exist at Teutopolis when Eric was in school. Its revival, Emily says, has been recent "in the grand scheme of things," but it's growing stronger every year. For a farming family, the significance isn't lost: their children have access to something their father never did.

The younger Brummers are still finding their way. Rachel is a junior. Rosella is a freshman. Alex, a sixth grader, is figuring things out. Audrey, a fourth grader, is "a tomboy at heart" who loves anything with a ball and running—and is currently certain she'll be a professional soccer player. And Adam, the second grader, has known his answer from the start.

"He's pretty sure he's going to be a farmer," Emily says. "From day one, that's all he's wanted to do. He loves that farm with his dad."

When asked what makes Teutopolis work, Eric keeps it plain: "The teachers care and the parents care. And if you have teachers that care and parents that care, that generally turns out to having good kids." He and Emily both note that a high percentage of teachers are Teutopolis natives themselves—people who grew up here, left for college, and came back to serve the community that shaped them.

Emily sees deeper forces at work, too. "There's a strong Catholic faith, strong Catholic tradition, and a strong German heritage," she says. "And I think those two things together—the Germans are known to be a little hard-headed and stubborn. They're not going to let themselves fail."

That stubbornness shows up everywhere: in the family farms that keep producing, in the school programs that keep expanding, in the volunteers who show up without being asked, and in a household of nine where the calendar is dry-erase and nobody lets go.

Eric and Emily didn't plan on seven children when they met a hundred miles from home. But they planted their family in a place where roots run deep and possibility grows in every direction—from a nursing degree at the university where they met, to a second grader who already knows he belongs on the land his father never left.