WELCOME BACK, MR. KIEHNE; KIEHNE BACK HOME TEACHING IN JACKSON

Mike Kiehne showed off the locker he used when he attended the school he will teach at.

When Mike Kiehne walks the halls at R.O. Hawkins Junior High School in Jackson, things look smaller. When he was a ninth-grader there, he was 5-foot-9, now he's 6-foot-5.

When school starts there Wednesday, Kiehne will teach American History and Introduction to Business to ninth-graders. Eleven years ago, Kiehne was a ninth-grader in the same school.

He'll be standing in front of some of the same classrooms facing in the opposite direction he did when he sat at a desk there.

He remembers being a seventh-grader at R.O. Hawkins and being intimidated by the size of the ninth-graders. Kiehne said the halls were so crowded that seventh-graders would run between classes to avoid getting swept along by the tide of the much larger ninth-graders.

So Kiehne is glad the seventh-graders are in middle school away from the ninth-graders.

The library is different now as well. It has new computers and isn't set up to be a study hall as it used to be. Kiehne is glad because he wants to have his students use the library for research. He likes to lecture but also likes to have students work on their own projects.

One difference he finds that makes him a bit nervous is having his former teachers as colleagues. He said they have gone out of their way to be helpful, but still he's a bit nervous.

"Teaching beside the teachers who taught you, you want them to know you know what you're doing," Kiehne said. "I don't want to let them down."

Of the 17 teachers new in the district, he is the only one returning to his old school. Bobbie Reagan, a Jackson High School graduate, will teach Orchard Elementary School. She had attended elementary school in Millersville and Burfordsville.

Of the 22 teachers entering the Cape Girardeau public schools this year, eight are graduates of Central High School.

There are dozens of teachers in the Jackson system who attended Jackson schools, said assistant superintendent Fred Jones. Other Jackson High School graduates have applied for work in the district and been rejected.

If Jackson graduates have any advantage at all, it is because they are known, Jones said. District policy is to look for the best possible teacher regardless of where they are from.

Jones thinks it's a tribute to the district that many of its graduates want to return.

Teachers remember Kiehne. Carl Gross, physical science teacher at R.O Hawkins, had Kiehne in eighth grade.

"I remember him as being very attentive," Gross said. "I remember him as being very polite and a very good student."

And he remembers watching Kiehne play basketball. Probably most of Jackson remembers watching Kiehne play basketball.

Kiehne was an all-state basketball player for a Jackson team that went 20-8 his senior year. After graduating in 1990, he attended Columbia College on a basketball scholarship and became the NAIA school's all-time scoring leader.

Kiehne started out majoring in business administration. "But I couldn't see me sitting behind a desk and doing the same old thing every day," he said.

What appealed to him about education is "you'd be teaching different things every day."

Plus he wants to coach basketball. He'll be assistant basketball coach at the high school this year.

Steve Burk, the head coach at Jackson, was Kiehne's head coach. Burk is confident Kiehne will be an asset to the program. "He'll be a very good example, with his work ethic and his intelligence," Burk said.

Kiehne held a similar position for the last two years at Bloomfield, teaching sixth-, seventh- and eight-grade social studies and assisting the varsity basketball coach.

He liked it there but jumped at the chance when Burk told him of the vacancy in Jackson.

Jackson is where Kiehne wants to be. "It was one of my goals to come back home," he said.