They call themselves the Dream Team, and they say it without irony. Five second-grade teachers at Vandalia — Courtney Smith, Rachel Holman, Michelle McDowell, Jill Doyle, and Jill Jewell — running five sections of about twenty kids each. They came from different places and took wildly different roads to get here. But every one of those roads curved back to the same thing.

Jill Jewell is the veteran. Vandalia class of 1990. She didn't go straight to teaching. She started in radiology. Then a patient came in with a knee bent the wrong direction, and she knew. "I don't think I can do this." She tried business classes. Nothing stuck. Finally, she stopped fighting it — Kaskaskia for her associates, Greenville University for her degree, a subbing stint at Vandalia, and then a hire that's lasted ever since. She's now teaching her former students' children. A dad walked in on Ammo Come and Go Day this year, saw her name on the door, and wrapped her in a hug. "Things like that just make you feel so good," she says.

Jill Doyle's grandfather was a superintendent in Greenville. She grew up lining dolls in chairs, running a checkout library in her bedroom. But when her best friend in high school said she wanted to be a teacher, Doyle decided she'd be different — she'd be a psychologist. Then she sat down in the college admissions office, they asked her what she wanted to do, and the word just came out.

"Teacher."

She started at Lindenwood, transferred to McKendree, and taught for nine years in O'Fallon. When she got hired at Vandalia, it was fall 2020 — the hybrid year. Nine kids Monday-Wednesday, nine Tuesday-Thursday, Fridays off. Jewell was her mentor.

"I told her, I'm training myself with you," Jewell says. "Because COVID was so new. I don't really know what I'm doing either."

They navigated it together. Doyle has a photo of her own second-grade teacher — Cynthia Wiegand, from Greenville, still alive — hanging in her classroom. Her kids, Miles and Nora, attend Vandalia even though the family lives in Greenville. She drives them in because this is where she wants them to be.

Courtney Smith is Vandalia class of 2017. She knew she wanted to teach because of a fifth-grade teacher named Ms. Dahl — who is now Mrs. Timmermann, the same Kate Timmermann teaching sixth-grade math one floor up. "She was life-changing for me." But Smith's family wanted her to go into nursing. She enrolled at Kaskaskia. Got a year in. Had a year left. And then she did something hard.

"I always said I have to go where my heart is," she says. She left nursing and pivoted to education. She still uses things from Timmermann's classroom in her own.

Rachel Holman graduated alongside Smith in 2017. She always knew. Worked in daycare first to get a feel for kids, then committed to teaching because she wanted to "make their brains grow." Now she's back in the building where she grew up — teaching the children of her own classmates.

"You kind of have that background on what the people in your community need," she says, "because you are the community."

She was worried, at first, about working alongside Jill Jewell — who had been her teacher. "You're worried she's going to treat you like a kid still. But she doesn't. She values my opinion."

Michelle McDowell took the longest detour. Both her parents were teachers — dad in high school English and history, mom in kindergarten — and she wanted no part of it. Got a legal administration degree. Worked in a law office. Was gone all the time. Never saw her kids. When the family moved to Vandalia, she knew Greta — the principal — who got her an aide position. She worked alongside kindergarten teachers Shay Tedrick and Gina Lutz, who told her around Christmas break: "You need to go to school to be a teacher."

She resisted. Then she didn't.

McDowell earned her degree online while working at the school, student-taught there, graduated in 2021, and started in second grade. When Greta came back to the building as principal, she found McDowell and said, "I got you started here all those years ago. I knew you'd end up here."

McDowell laughs. "She knew where I was headed before I did."

Together, these five are teaching the year when reading catches fire. Second grade is when kids move from decoding individual sounds to reading chapter books — when visualization replaces picture books, and the stories start to live inside their heads. All five sections read The Wild Robot together, then watch the movie, and the kids compare what they imagined to what they see on screen.

"It's a really cool year," Doyle says. "Kids get into certain types of books, and then you're seeing them wanting to read all the series."

They work in the same hallway — three classrooms — one on one side, two on the other, and they communicate constantly. When one of them is having a hard day, she walks into another's room. When a new idea works, it gets shared by lunch. The team spans from a 29-year veteran to teachers still in their first handful of years, and McDowell says the range is the point.

"On paper, it would be very easy for us to completely clash," she says. "But we all respect each other, even if we don't have the same opinion. Anytime I've ever had a question, Jill Jewell will drop what she's doing and answer it. If I'm having a bad day, I can pop into Doyle's room. These two — we bounce ideas off each other. We're always encouraging each other and sharing ideas. And I feel like that just makes us that much better."

Five classrooms. A hundred kids. Two Jills, a Courtney, a Rachel, and a Michelle — all of whom got here by way of radiology, law offices, nursing school, daycare, and one clear voice in a college admissions office.

The Dream Team. They earned the name.