Don Eichenberger: Great success comes with great passion

Success born from passion

NWA Democrat-Gazette/CHARLIE KAIJO "Mr. Don Eichenberger has served the Springdale School District with distinction for more than 30 years as a classroom teacher, a coach and a building assistant principal. In those roles, he has become one of the Springdale School District's most recognized, appreciated and respected leaders of professional development, and thus he is an individual prepared to model best practices in literacy, health education and career and technical education." -- Jim Rollins
NWA Democrat-Gazette/CHARLIE KAIJO "Mr. Don Eichenberger has served the Springdale School District with distinction for more than 30 years as a classroom teacher, a coach and a building assistant principal. In those roles, he has become one of the Springdale School District's most recognized, appreciated and respected leaders of professional development, and thus he is an individual prepared to model best practices in literacy, health education and career and technical education." -- Jim Rollins

There's a large window in one of Assistant Principal Don Eichenberger's office walls that looks directly out on the commons of Springdale High School. When the fourth period bell rings, it's a bit startling how quickly the space fills up with teenagers on their lunch break, and their happy chatter spills into his office. The blinds are down, but open, so Eichenberger can see the kids; you get the sense this is not so much to keep tabs on them as it is to stay connected to them. That can be hard, he says, for someone who transitions from classroom teacher to assistant principal, as he did in 2011.

"He cherishes working closely with each student, assisting them to realize their true potential and promise," says Springdale Public Schools Superintendent Jim Rollins. "He has the special talent to relate to students in such a way that they can understand that he only wants to help them be successful in school. ... Thousands of Springdale students have found their way because of him and the servant's heart he constantly displays."

Through Others’ Eyes

Don Eichenberger

“‘You can do this. I will help you,’ is a renowned sentiment for many, many Springdale teachers and administrators. That phrase should have been developed with Don Eichenberger in mind. It has been a priority throughout his career, and thousands of Springdale students have found their way because of him and the servant’s heart he constantly displays. To see Don Eichenberger receive state recognition for his support and encouragement of Springdale students inspires us all!” — Jim Rollins

“I think [the award] is well deserved. I don’t know anybody that loves Springdale High School more than Don Eichenberger. The love that he has for this school is unparalleled. He’s been a committed parent, teacher, administrator — he’s connected to Springdale High School in so many ways, and he always goes above and beyond. It did not surprise me that he received this award.” — Lynn Faust

“The job of an administrator is never boring, although sometimes you wish it was. It takes someone who can think quickly on their feet, and also someone who has good judgment. That comes from experience but also from an innate sense of what’s right and wrong. You can’t teach that. You can coach it. But [Don] has that special ability to do that without having to coach him very hard. When I was fortunate enough to be principal, I knew I could turn things over to Don and he would do the right thing. I put him in charge of seniors, and I never had to second guess him. I was fortunate to have someone like that supporting me when I was principal.” — Pete Joenks

"There are a lot of things that assistant principals have to do -- they're probably the most called-upon people in the district," says Pete Joenks of Eichenberger, who just won the 2020 Arkansas Association of Secondary School Principals Assistant Principal of the Year Award. Joenks is an assistant superintendent in Prairie Grove now, but he worked with Eichenberger for nearly three decades -- first as teachers, then, later, as administrators when Joenks held the position of principal. "They're kind of like sergeants, called on to do a lot, the backbone of a school. You can get lost in that, but Don knew his gift and his talent was working with kids, and he made a point to focus in that area, and really, that's what we were all about there. I always joke that the farther you move up in education, the farther you get pulled away from what got you involved in it in the first place -- but Don never did that. He always stayed grounded in what his highest priority was -- the students."

As Eichenberger gazes out at the kids outside his office, he explains that they're settling in to eat their lunch there, instead of the cafeteria, a change the administration made some time back to try and make kids as comfortable as possible.

"That's where they could be and get away from folks -- me, being an introverted kid, I thought, 'Great,'" he says. "So we worked out a deal. They can eat in the cafeteria or here. There are all kinds of quiet places they can eat and as long as they pick up their trash, they're fine.

"They don't have to ride their bike home to eat fish sticks with their mom," he finishes, a wry grin splitting his face.

Sports opens doors

Eichenberger is a big man: He's imposing when his expression is serious, but he has a sly sense of humor, and his face is transformed when he smiles. The comment about fish sticks is a reference to a story he told earlier in the interview. Eichenberger -- gregarious and talkative now -- suffered from crippling shyness as a kid, and, for him, walking into a crowded cafeteria was a misery.

"I was painfully introverted growing up," he admits. Born in Clarksville, his family moved to the small town of Olney, Ill., when he was just 5. They returned to Clarksville when he was in ninth grade. "I would look at your shoes every now and then and that was about it. I grew out of it when I was about, oh, 50. I was the kid that wouldn't talk to you in the hallway, but if there's a loose ball, I was fighting for it on the floor. So I always went home for lunch every day until I was in ninth grade. Second, third and fourth grade, I had to stay at school, but starting in fifth grade, I went home every day."

Luckily, Eichenberger excelled at sports, which allowed him to socialize with his teammates. He showed talent in football, baseball and basketball, but basketball was the sport that meant the most to him. He played on scholarship in college and, when an injury took him out of the game for good, he turned to coaching -- something he had always wanted to do.

"My favorite uncle was a coach at Mulberry for 40-something years," he says. "So I had the coaching bug. I love the game of basketball. I still cry every time I watch Hoosiers -- that's [just like] small-town Illinois, where I grew up. I played basketball in gyms just like that."

Eichenberger had plans to attend law school -- he had been accepted at the University of Texas law school with an eye toward applying for the FBI -- when he met his wife, Myra. He was in Fort Smith for a game and went to a Wednesday night church service.

"I came in and sat in the back, and I looked down at the end of the row, and I saw the woman who would become my wife, and I fell in love at first sight," remembers Eichenberger. "I couldn't quit looking at her. I tried to talk to her afterwards, but I was just stuttering. I thought, 'Oh, wow, this is the prettiest girl that I've ever seen in the world that's ever talked back to me.' It took me three months to get up enough guts to ask her out ... on our third date, I asked her to marry me, and she wouldn't speak to me for two weeks.

"That was in March. She finally called back and said, 'OK, I'll go out with you again, but you can't say anything else about marriage.' Deal. So in June, we're at a softball tournament in Fort Smith, and we're waiting for the next game, and she says, 'Let's just drive over to Oklahoma and get married.'" A huge smile spreads across Eichenberger's face at this point in the story. "I said, 'I would, but if I did, my mother would never speak to me again.' So we got married on Labor Day."

Small-town coaching

Eichenberger's very first coaching job out of college -- at Lamar High School -- turned out to be a dramatic introduction to what could sometimes be a tenuous, political job as a coach.

"I was hired on a performance contract, which means you could be fired for losing, which was very common back in the 1970s and 1980s," he explains. "They've pretty much done away with those now. But then, if you didn't win, you were out. Before I came, Lamar had won three games in three years -- two, one and zero the three years before I got there. My first year, we went 10 and 17, second year, 8 and 12.

"And then, I got cross-ways in some small town school board stuff. They had a school board meeting and got rid of the superintendent, the principal and the head basketball coach, all on the same night. So like in Hoosiers, when they had a town meeting about Jimmy, they had a town meeting about me. I got 801 votes to stay, and seven to go. It was almost a riot. It was covered by both television stations in Little Rock and one in Fort Smith. It was quite the big deal in 1983 -- just one of those weird deals, where a guy had been fired by the superintendent when he was principal, and he wanted his job back. So he ran for school board and got on, just so he could fire the superintendent. Another guy was mad at the principal, something to do with his son. And a third guy didn't like me, but he couldn't get three votes, so it was one of those 'I'll vote for yours if you vote for mine' deals."

Despite the overwhelming community support, Eichenberger decided it was probably time to leave the sticky situation the school found itself in. He moved to Searcy to work at Harding University and, later, Harding Academy, where he and wife Myra became dorm parents -- and had two sons of their own, Zach and J.T.

"I don't know how we survived that," he says with a grin. "We were dorm parents, we had two little kids, and I was coaching all the basketball from fourth grade up -- football and track, as well. I had five different classes, taught a Bible class at the university. There was a lot going on."

Their next move was to be their last -- they settled in Springdale in 1990, where Eichenberger would start his 29-year career with Springdale Public Schools when he was hired at Springdale High School as a teacher and assistant basketball and track coach. He coached for many of those years, finally giving that up around 2008. He says he learned a lot about coaching from the men who coached him as he was growing up.

"Winning is important, yes. But more important is to learn the other lessons in life," he says. "That's one of the reasons I went into coaching. I coached for 26 years all together, doing the things that are important -- teaching young boys how to be men, and the things that they need to do in their own lives to be successful. That was always more important than anything. Now, along the way, we won a ton of ball games. I think if you do the one thing, then I think the other thing falls in line. Without that, things fall apart."

Turning to literacy

In truth, Eichenberger seems like a born coach: It's clear he loves it, and in his office, he's surrounded by the kind of motivational prints and quotes that people often use to encourage passion and commitment in sports. So it's not surprising that, after he gave up coaching on the court, he found something else to fill that void -- he turned to coaching literacy instruction in the classroom.

"I met a guy named Mark Forget who came here to do a workshop on literacy training," he says. "Ways to make kids better readers. We were just beginning to encounter this problem where a lot of our kids were way far behind grade level on reading. So how can we teach them better?"

Eichenberger says he and Forget went to play golf after the workshop and, on the last hole, they made a bet. If Eichenberger missed the putt, he would have to implement the literacy strategies he had just worked on in class the next year.

He missed the putt.

"So the next year I came in, and I started doing it," he says. "I liked it. I found out it made a difference for my kids. My kids were actually performing better. On a test that we use to measure how much they were learning about government and history, my kids were doing much better than everybody else's. I said, "Well, this is something really cool.'"

He was so enthusiastic about the method, he started consulting as a literacy coach, training teachers at his own school and flying all over the country to train other educators.

"Over that 10-year period of time, hundreds, probably thousands, of teachers have attended workshops that I've put on," he says. "At that time, I was still in the classroom, so I could say, 'This is what I do every day. Here are the results I've had. Does that sound like something that would work for you?' For me, it was one of the most fun things I've ever done, and I actually have something meaningful to contribute."

"Don always had a passion for helping kids -- when he was coaching, he had that passion on the basketball court," notes Joenks. "It was neat to watch him as he transitioned that to the classroom. He took all of that energy and passion and turned it into [a focus on] literacy. It was phenomenal to watch him grow as an educator as he took on a different role."

Meanwhile, Eichenberger had decided to go into administration. After a brief interlude when he took an assistant principal position at Archer Learning Center, he landed back at Springdale High when an administrative position opened up there.

"I'm all about school culture: Every school has a different one," says Joenks who, as principal of SHS, hired Eichenberger as assistant principal. "Springdale High School has a great culture, but I knew we had to sustain that culture at our school that bred success. He was the type to understand what culture was and what it took to maintain it. When the opportunity came to hire an assistant principal, the first person I thought of was Don."

Colleagues say Eichenberger's talents at mentorship and coaching weren't limited to just literacy. SHS Assistant Principal Lynn Faust says when Eichenberger learned she wanted to go into administration when both were working at the Archer Learning Center, he took her under his wing.

"He allowed me to be involved in things that exposed me to other areas of the job, and then, afterwards, he would debrief about it with me, and sometimes explain why he made certain decisions," she says. "Those reflective conversations were helpful for me to process the words he had chosen, all the components of his decision."

"The things that that fall on an assistant principal's plate each day at a big comprehensive Title I school like Springdale High School -- I can't even begin to tell you the range of things you do," says Eichenberger. "From special education concerns, to legal concerns, to vaping -- and then the academic side: making sure your ESSA [Every Student Succeeds Act] test scores are going up, that you're meeting the needs of all of your clients in different sub-groups and sub-populations. And that's not even counting the demands from outside, from community leaders or from parents -- especially angry parents. I tell people, 'This is the greatest job in the world, if you're tough enough.' Because it's hard."

Success in any language

Eichenberger's job -- and that of the administrative team, support staff and teachers at SHS -- has its own particular brand of difficulty. Since Eichenberger came to work in the school system, it has grown from around 7,700 students to nearly 22,000; many of those new students are children of immigrants who moved to Springdale to seek economic opportunities. Eichenberger and his team are tasked with teaching English to a large population of students who are struggling to learn the language.

"Every teacher and every admin -- every educator we have at this school does the very best they can in the situation we're in," he says. "It's going to be a little harder to work in Springdale High School than a lot of places, but it's going to be more rewarding, because you're going to see the fruits of your labor. And we do, every day. Ninety percent of my kids here are as great of kids as you're going to find anywhere. They're active, they're supporting their families. They're growing up so quickly, facing adult challenges in their lives, and they're still coming here to get their education.

"I can tell you a hundred stories. We had a boy last year whose mother died and whose father had terminal cancer. He took care of Dad. He's working full time. He's playing on the basketball team, and he's working a 40-hour-a-week job to support Dad and his sister. When you see those kids, you'll do anything in your heart to help them get to where they want to be.

"Last year, I had 525 kids that were here in January. Some were on track to graduate. Some were not. We graduated 524 of those kids. That's why I put those up," he nods towards a series of senior class photos on the wall. "That's the most impressive thing. Working with these kids and trying to help those that want to help themselves. It's a tremendously great feeling."

"He's very compassionate," says Faust. "He's gone out and bought kids clothes and food. When he sees a kid with a need, he takes care of it at his own expense. Sometimes from his own closet, sometimes he buys things new. He does a lot at his own expense to take care of basic needs that our students have so that they can come to school and focus on that instead of what they might be lacking at home."

The evening of this interview, says Eichenberger, an assembly is being held to honor students who qualified for the Arkansas Biliteracy Award. He says there are around 300 students from various Arkansas schools receiving the award.

"We have 99 students that have proven themselves to be competent in more than one language, and that's an every year thing," he says. "We have over 1,000 in the [English as a Second Language] program, over half of our students. Tons of them are making great progress toward becoming competent in a second language -- and it's not just English. We have a lot of Hispanic kids that are now proficient in German or French or in Chinese Mandarin."

The note of pride in Eichenberger's voice is unmistakable when speaking of his students. It's yet another bit of evidence that points to why he was chosen for the Assistant Principal of the Year Award. He found out he was the recipient at an all-school assembly -- he thought he was attending a QuestBridge event, but, instead, his delighted co-workers and students surprised him by telling him he had won the highest honor in the state for an assistant principal.

"Anything that I do is just a small part of what everybody here does," he says. "We have people who do great things each day and being able to help them do the things that they do is really important.

"I always quote Esther 4:14: 'You know not why you were placed in this position but for such a time for this.' I truly enjoy this job every day of my life, because you never know what's going to happen."

NAN Profiles on 12/15/2019

Upcoming Events