Growing up in Springfield, Vt., in a family in which nearly all the men were machinists, Jeff Thomas had no plans to go into education. He was more attuned to the hardwood of the basketball court than to the classroom blackboard, and graduated 170th in his class of 210 students.

But even then, he showed an interest in teaching. At 14, he ran summer basketball camps in his driveway for the other kids in his neighborhood.

Thomas turns 60 in September, and is now a retired educator, having finished his three-year contract as principal of White River Valley High School in South Royalton on June 30. As education has changed around him, he stayed focused on a core belief that kept his attention on individual students.

“My big pitch is that we all grow at different rates,” Thomas said in a recent interview in his office at White River Valley, which serves Bethel and Royalton as well as students from surrounding towns.

Over the course of his career as a coach, a physical education teacher and athletic director and as an administrator, Thomas has seen the education establishment come around to his way of thinking.

“I certainly think his background of having to work hard through school,” and of receiving support from teachers and coaches, meant that Thomas could approach struggling students in an authentic way, Jamie Kinnarney, superintendent of the White River Valley Supervisory Union, said in an interview.

Career change

While he was working at Bryant Grinder, after studying mechanical engineering at Vermont Technical College, Thomas also coached basketball, often arranging his work schedule around coaching. When his boss told him he’d have to choose between his job and coaching, he gave notice and moved to get a teaching license.

It helped that he was dating a teacher who was herself the daughter of academics. Thomas and Jill Yankee were married the year after he took his first teaching job, at what was then the South Royalton School.

“She kind of supported me and talked me into it,” Thomas said.

Even then, more than 30 years ago, there was a non-traditional route open to him. He started taking classes at Community College of Vermont and finished through the external degree program at Johnson State College, now part of the Vermont State University system.

“I was part of that pathway, 800 years ago,” Thomas said.

In his first stint in South Royalton, Thomas led the boys basketball team to the 1995 Division III state championship. He also served as athletic director and ran a busy summer basketball camp at the school.

After eight or nine years at South Royalton, Thomas left so he and Jill and their two young children could spend two years in Tunisia, where they taught at an international school and saw the extremes of privilege and privation up close. When he came back, he taught at Tunbridge Central School for a year, then became athletic director at Woodstock Union Middle High School. He earned his principal’s license and served as dean of students for three years.

He moved to the Hartford School District and led its Independent Learning Center, where his experience as a non-traditional student served him well. The ILC operated a small-engine repair shop and the Sasquatch Sandwich Shop, both run and staffed by students. And the center had a “Kid for a Day” program that sent students out to work for people in the community.

‘We needed a unifier’

In addition to teaching and coaching, Thomas and his wife also bought and resold houses, at first to put their kids through college. They’d earned enough that Thomas was planning to retire in 2022, when his contract was up in Hartford. But Kinnarney urged him to apply for the job in South Royalton.

The merger of the Bethel and Royalton school districts under Vermont’s Act 46 school merger law had not been uniformly smooth, and Kinnarney knew that Thomas would help knit the young White River Valley district together.

“I just felt like we needed a unifier,” Kinnarney said.

The new school also needed an identity, so it could attract students from surrounding towns with high school choice. White River Valley’s is the only high school within its 10-town supervisory union, and the other eight towns have choice for high school (some have it for all grades).

Under Thomas’ leadership, the district more than doubled its tuition students, from 40 to 83, Kinnarney said. Bringing in more tuition students helps the district financially and also makes the small high school of around 215 students more viable.

It helped that Thomas was a known quantity in the school community. He had coached and taught the parents of many current students.

“I don’t think I could be a principal at any other school,” Thomas said. The community had embraced him during his first stint, he said.

A school principal sets the tone for teaching and learning, and the key to Thomas’ success is approaching it as a coach. The teachers are a team, and the students in each classroom are teams, too.

“I think teaching and coaching are so similar,” Shane Oakes, who worked under Thomas as the school’s student support coordinator and has succeeded him as principal, said in an interview.

Where teaching invokes images of an instructor imparting knowledge, coaching is more about figuring out how to connect with and get the best out of everyone on the team, said Oakes, who also started out as a physical education teacher and a coach.

He cited two traits that Thomas brought to the district: “He truly believes in everybody,” Oakes said, calling Thomas “the ultimate cheerleader and coach ... really helping people just find their best version of themselves.”

And, “he seems to say ‘yes’ to everything,” which is related to his belief in the people around him.

As he’s worked through his career, Thomas has seen education shift toward his own views. “Personalized learning” and “flexible pathways” were not part of the education lexicon in the early 1990s, but are at the heart of it now.

Technology cuts both ways

Education has changed in other, less salutary ways, Thomas said.

“I would say the biggest change is technology,” he said. Classrooms in most schools now use Promethean Boards, a brand of smartboard that puts materials on a screen. And every student now has a laptop and is expected to use digital tools to complete and hand in assignments.

While the new tools are helpful for visual learners like Thomas, they can be a distraction. But that distraction is nothing compared to how smartphones have changed the social fabric of middle and high schools. Phones are at the core of the youth mental health crisis, and schools are having mixed success dealing with them, he said.

Four classrooms at WRVHS stuck with a policy requiring students to leave their phones at the door during class, but eight others were inconsistent. Teachers struggled with that conflict at the start of the year, Thomas said, but setting the tone for the year is one of the hardest things for an educator to master.

“I’m a 30-year teacher so I’ve only had 30 days to get that right,” he said.

Because of digital distraction, the ongoing challenge of trying to meet every student’s needs and the tide of new federal and state education initiatives, “teaching today, I think, is harder than it’s ever been,” Thomas said.

New state laws come down to schools, but often without sufficient professional development to implement them successfully, he said. Act 127, the state’s new pupil weighting law, brought new funding to the White River district, which used it for new staff to support students, but he knows there are students who need still more.

H. 454, signed into law this week, will take years to implement, and could change everything from how schools are funded to where children go to school. Thomas said he can see where the state needs to be more affordable for young families. But, “I wouldn’t want my 7-year-old traveling an hour to go to school either,” he said.

Thomas didn’t say so, but Kinnarney said that the recently retired principal will be in the district in the coming year, subbing for administrators and working as a student support coordinator for Oakes.

It’s hard to leave education behind after starting as a coach at 14. When he started at White River Valley, Thomas left notes on every student’s locker for Valentine’s Day, a tangible token of his motivation.

“I love our kids,” he said.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.