Excused absence

May 6, 2005

BOB MARTINSON/Frontiersman reporter

WASILLA - Teeland Middle School principal Larry Jacobson has been the guiding force for the school since it opened four years ago. Now, "Dr. J" has announced his retirement after an illustrious career in academic and extracurricular education.

Teeland Middle School's students have accomplished a lot since 2001.

Recently, Teeland students took top honors in the state geography bee, Letters about Literature competition, the Pacific Northwest Creative Writing competition - besting 5,000 entrants - and the state Science Olympiad, as well as winning second place in the state math competition and placing third in the state spelling bee. This week, a Teeland student won the state chess championship.

Add to this the school's athletic statistics - five of its six basketball teams won district championships in their divisions and 20 percent of the school's 650 students tried out for track.

Jacobson has long been noticed for bringing out the best inside the children he has had the chance to help along the way - two of whom are his daughters, Sunny and Brit.

Each of his daughters played basketball at Chugiak High School and each ended up funding a college education by getting a scholarship to play for Kansas State University.

Each had a notable career at that university and each married fellow athletes. Sunny married Todd Weiner, an All-American football player from KSU who played four years for the Seattle Seahawks and now plays right tackle for the Atlanta Falcons. Brit married Josh Reid, a basketball player for Kansas State and now works for Archer Industries in Kansas City. From all this, Larry Jacobson has quite a family sports wall in his office, with pictures portraying many of them performing in sports.

At Teeland, Jacobson is constantly recognized for all the guidance he has given children.

"He interacts with students morning, noon and night, meets the bus, attends all three lunches and sees the buses off at night," said Anne Kilkenny, who chairs the parent organization at Teeland. "I challenge you to find another regular public school in Alaska that has exhibited such excellence in both academics and athletics. This didn't happen by accident, it happened by design - Dr. Jacobson's design."

Jacobson outlined his vision.

"We like to say that we are tough on issues, but gentle on people," Jacobson said. "You have to have a unique balance of extracurricular activities and curricular activities, with high expectations for children in both arenas, and then they complement each other. Therefore, if you have high expectations across the building, and that is perpetuated by high expectation for children by staff, then your children achieve because you have awesome leadership, your staff members understand that and they take the children as far as they can go. You want to cultivate that as far as you can."

He credits Monica Goyette, the school's assistant principal, in helping with much of that.

"Miss Goyette is really instrumental in making that happen within the staff and the building," Jacobson said. "You create a culture and it really gets exciting."

"It's Larry's vision and I think it's an interesting vision for a school," said Goyette, who will take over as principal when Jacobson retires at the end of this school year. "Larry is a very strong leader, but the spotlight is not on him - he does not promote himself. He spends all of his time fostering the success of the kids, our staff and our parent community. This school is such a reflection of him and how he operates as a leader."

Teeland's Science Olympians are going to nationals for the third time in a row, because they won the state tournament. The parents and staff are collaborating to fund their trip and Alcan Construction, which built the school, just donated $2,500 to help send the kids to the National Science Olympiad.

"He has created an environment where all this flourishes," Kilkenny said.

There are many other businesses that are collaborating with parents and staff to help the school succeed.

Jacobson has known his wife, Debbie, since the eighth grade, in Idaho. He graduated from Sandpoint High School in 1966, and then earned an undergraduate degree from Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash.

Quite an athlete himself, Jacobson tried out for the Edmonton Eskimos and stayed with the team for a short time. Then he decided to pursue his master's degree in education, and went on to get another master's in education and his doctorate in guidance and counseling at the University of Idaho.

From there, his first job was teaching at Issaquah High School, near Seattle, where he was also the football coach. His team won the King County championship in 1972.

Jacobson then moved back to Sandpoint, began teaching, and was in the administration there. In 1984, Jacobson and his wife drove up the Alcan Highway to Alaska, where he found a job teaching at Palmer High School for three years, beginning his 20 years in Valley schools. He went on to Palmer Middle School for nine years, spent four years at Colony Middle School, and then served these last four years at Teeland.

Jacobson, whose wife conveniently works for Alaska Airlines, has good reasons for retirement at this time.

"I wouldn't be leaving, except I have five grandkids now and they are in Kansas City and Atlanta," he said. "If you're going to create a legacy and be in the lives of your grandkids, you need to allocate time, especially when they are not here with you. So you see, my wife and I need to have more time, because pretty soon they'll begin to live their own lives.

"I've been going to school for 51 years now and I'm going to skip the next year," he said. "We'll continue to live here and be Alaskans, but I just might be able to drop in a little more often, to attend a few Falcons games and see the grandchildren a little bit more this next year."

Contact Bob Martinson at 352-2269, or bob.martinson@

frontiersman.com.