H-D-CAL’s Kingland-Hanson retires after 34 years of upbeat lessons and unbreakable connections

Long before Carolyn Kingland-Hanson came to Hampton-Dumont-CAL High School as an English teacher, she had an interaction with a staff member that foreshadowed the sense of family she’d develop in 34 years with the district.

Kingland-Hanson, who retired following this year, recalls meeting then H-D band director Leon Kuehner when she first arrived at the district and remembering she had met Kuehner many years before.

Kuehner served as the judge for Kingland-Hanson during a solo music contest in middle school. Nervousness and a series of misfortune, including the ailment of her piano accompanist, led Kingland Hanson to begin her performance on a shaky note. She said Kuehner told her to stop, get herself calmed down and collected and come back to try again.

“After all that, he gave me a I (the highest rating),” she said, adding that she asked Kuehner about why he decided to give her the rating upon meeting him when she accepted the position at H-D-CAL. “He said, ‘You just persevered.’”

Kingland-Hanson eventually developed a close relationship with Kuehner and his wife, Linda, who became a mentor for Kingland-Hanson early on in her career. As she completed year after year, she developed more longstanding relationships both in the district and throughout the community. Eventually, she realized she had found a place in which she could spend her entire career.

“When everything is good, then you don’t want to leave,” she said. “That’s why I stayed. I saw a real quality here and I didn’t want to leave it.”

Kingland-Hanson, a Lake Mills native, came to Hampton following graduation from Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. She began by teaching freshman in English I and picked up a literature class for upperclassmen, duties she would maintain for the remainder of her career.

With freshman, Kingland-Hanson said she found a group of students willing to have fun and embrace her light hearted style of instruction, but also a group with their whole high school career in front of them.

“They were so willing to play along, they were still young, still goofy and wonderful all at the same time,” she said.

At the end of each year, she had freshman write their future selves a letter regarding goals and ambitions and would return those letters to students as they completed their senior years. She said seniors read the letters with some embarrassment, but in that embarrassment was the lesson.

“When kids say their writing was terrible freshman year, I tell them that it’s not terrible, they just made progress,” she said. “I told them that if you are the same person you were as a freshman, I was a little bit nervous for them because they hadn’t taken that opportunity to grow.

“In that class, those were some of my closest, most honest conversations with kids,” she said.

Kingland-Hanson said that the bonds she made with students in the classroom haven’t ended with graduation. She said years later, she’ll still have students “feed the chickie,” a gesture her students make when they are proud of an accomplishment, and recite “Carpe Diem” from Dead Poets’ Society. Those tiny gestures, she said, went the longest in inspiring students.

“It’s just the little things like that that makes them connect with you,” she said. “Literature is so much more than words. It has all these great lessons in life and humanity and I think because I loved it, they enjoyed the class.”

The decision to retire didn’t come quite the way Kingland-Hanson had envisioned. She thought retirement would be as a result of a lack of enjoyment in her career, but that feeling never came.

“I always told my kids I would retire and resign when I wasn’t enjoying it, but I still loved it and I think that’s the way you have to want to end your career,” she said.

She added that she ultimately decided to retire because she felt the need to turn the position over to a teacher with new ideas and a different brand of enthusiasm that could refresh the program while continuing to inspire students. She said she felt at ease when two former students applied for the job and knew that the future would be in good hands.

“I was in my mind excited that we had those applicants and knew we’d be okay,” she said.

But Kingland-Hanson’s career didn’t end quietly, even though the year ended abruptly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She was given the opportunity to be the speaker for this year’s commencement ceremony. The offer was made and accepted before the pandemic began, but Kingland-Hanson over the next two months realized the importance she was granted.

“They were heartbroken and then they started to think about the bigger picture of the whole class, they were trying to make their togetherness real,” she said. “I was sad about not being able to say goodbye, not to have them there for that moment and it really struck us as difficult.”

The students and district responded to that heartbreak in the form of a modified commencement ceremony in the high school parking lot. Kingland-Hanson still served as the speaker, bringing the same energy and uniqueness the seniors grew to love as freshman. Amid a dance routine, jokes and musical pieces was a message of mutual respect, adoration and care.

“Being a speaker gave me a chance to tell the students, tell parents, tell the staff I worked with that they were the best,” she said. “It was the best moment and I got to say goodbye to the people that have always mattered to me and I got the message out that the Class of 2020 was incredibly special to me.

“I was so happy to tell the class and to tell the community and to tell the parents thank you and I was expecting wonderful things for them,” she added.