News

Legendary Dundee-Crown environmental teacher retiring

Posted March 16, 2010 11:00 pm

By Jameel Naqvi

Gary Swick wheels a cart down the empty halls of Dundee-Crown High School, collecting used bottles, discarded newspapers, crumpled love notes, aluminum cans - all the things the teenage boys and girls need to last from the 7:40 a.m. bell until dismissal at 2:55 p.m.

Swick will be back in a week, wheeling a cart down the same hallways, collecting the same bottles, newspapers, notes, aluminum cans, aborted homework assignments. Maybe he's seen some of the things before in earlier incarnations - a can of diet soda he drank last month, a copy of the Chicago Tribune he picked up at a gas station on Elgin's far west side, a plastic baggie he used to wrap a sandwich he brought for lunch.

But soon, the cycle will be broken. Swick's easygoing demeanor; his folksy, self-effacing teaching style; the trademark Sam Elliot-style mustache and the smile it partially conceals; the rainbow belt that holds up his blue jeans; the conviction in his voice when he talks about the joy of discovery - all of those things, familiar touchstones for 34 years at the Carpentersville high school, will soon be gone.

In about three months, Swick will retire. The moment came a few years ago, when Swick looked around and saw former students who were now colleagues, teachers he had mentored who had gone on to become mentors themselves, new science labs, and a few more white hairs in that clump under his nose.

"I thought I was a new teacher for 25 years, then I looked around and I'm like, wow, you're an old guy," Swick said recently, as he sat down to reflect on his career. At 56, he says, "My time is more valuable. I can spread my love in a lot of different places."

After almost three-and-a-half decades of standing before a chalkboard, muddying his tennis shoes in the swamps and fens of Dundee Township and pulling a paddle through the tranquil channels of the Fox River, it would be hard for Swick to mothball his sport coat of recycled newspaper. So he won't.

Instead, Swick will focus on things he neglected because of his career. He will lobby Springfield lawmakers for the Sierra Club, seek grant money for a water quality monitoring program he runs and perhaps apply for a teaching position at a community college.

"It means a freedom," Swick said of retirement. "I don't want to just turn around and get back on the same treadmill."

Swick ended up on that treadmill almost by accident. The future environmentalist first developed an appreciation for the outdoors while growing up next to a forest preserve in suburban Chicago. "I just got a wonder and love for nature by being part of it," he says. In 1972, Swick enrolled in the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, intending to pursue a degree in political science. Later, he decided to study natural resource management instead.

The final piece of the puzzle - teaching - came a bit later.

"I went to school to be a forester, and I learned along the way I really enjoyed working with children," Swick says.

Still, Swick, who hadn't held a "real" job and barely did any student teaching, didn't think he'd land a teaching job after he graduated. He was staying at his friend's cabin in Eagle River, Wis., when he got a note to call Don Rich, associate superintendent for secondary education for Community Unit District 300, the Carpentersville-based school system that includes Dundee-Crown, then Irving Crown High School. "I thought I was in trouble because I wasn't looking for a job at all," recalls Swick, who had worked a summer program for the district.

It was one week before the start of school, and Crown was in a tight spot after an unexpected departure left the school without a teacher for two new courses: forestry management and recreational animals (pets).

"They were desperate, so I got a job," Swick says.

Swick met Rich at the administrator's cabin in Rhinelander, Wis., where they fished and talked about the job.

"When he got to the part where I'd be making $10,000, I flipped because I never had more than $100," Swick remembers. "I thought I'd be driving a Lincoln."

Instead, he drove down to Carpentersville in a 1963 Chevy Impala he bought off a farmer for $100. The car broke down along the way, but he was able to get it running again and "limped home in it."

Swick showed up to his first meeting with his new boss six hours late in a grease-spotted white T-shirt, ripped jeans and no socks, sporting a bushy goatee and ponytail, with grease up to his elbows, much to the dismay of Principal Jack Lurain, who was attired in a three-piece suit despite temperatures that reached 90 degrees and a building that lacked air conditioning.

"He wouldn't shake my hand," Swick recalls. "He wanted nothing to do with me."

Swick, now regarded as the founding father of Dundee-Crown's acclaimed environmental science program, didn't have a vision when he accepted his first job out of school.

"I just walked into this situation," he says. "I wanted to make my mom proud." Because there was no foundation to build on, Swick had to build the foundation himself. He started with the yellow pages, looking for resources on animals and the environment. He quickly learned to rely on the Fox Valley's rich natural resources and the people who already had a deep appreciation and understanding of those assets. Instead of conducting a stodgy textbook science lab, Swick used the open spaces as his laboratory.

"I started understanding how students really needed to connect with things," he says. "If you actually do it, then some of those facts and figures don't really matter. It gets inside you."

It helped that Swick was able to fly under the radar in the pre-liability era.

"No one really cared what I did, so I could get away with things."

Today, Swick has had a hand in nearly all the major environmental initiatives in the northern Fox Valley: the successful effort to save the Pure Oil silo in Carpentersville's Raceway Woods forest preserve from demolition; "Monitor with your Mother," an annual Mother's Day event that teaches families how to monitor water quality in the Fox River; "Perry in the Prairie," a program that educates students from Dundee-Crown and Carpentersville's Perry Elementary School about the prairie ecosystem; the "Cool Bus," a school bus that runs on biofuel and teaches area students about conservation; "Teen Teaching," which has high school students develop an environmental science curriculum for other students; and the community's annual Earth Week celebrations.

In 1996, Swick's push for students to be more politically active helped pass an $18 million Dundee Township conservation district by fewer than 50 votes, and in 2001, Swick was one of three teachers from the United States chosen to spend two weeks in Kazakhstan on an educational mission. Swick's efforts have won him a series of prestigious awards, including Kane County's D.L. Hoeft High School Educator of the Year, the Milken National Educator Award, Kane County Educator of the Year, the professional development award from the President's Council on Environmental Quality and the Richard C. Bartlett Environmental Education Award.

Swick is gracious about the awards, but in his typically humble fashion shares the credit with his students and colleagues.

"They're not citing me for the great things I did," Swick says. "I might have been the catalyst for the programs, but none of these have been because of Gary Swick." Still, he admits: "It's fun to win stuff. I find it thrilling."

Swick believes his most important lesson has been getting people to realize that everything they do has an impact.

"These kids in the school don't even know there's a river down there. They drive over it, but they're driving on a bridge. They have no idea how alive it is. 'Oh yeah, there's fish in there.' They have no idea how alive it is and how sensitive it is - and once they understand that, they behave differently.

"Once you get a kid in a stream to pick up a rock and find a damselfly larva on it, they will never look at that stream the same way again 'cause they know it's alive."

On Jan. 22, students at Dundee-Crown High School held a roast to honor retiring environmental science teacher Gary Swick. Christopher Hankins | Staff Photographer

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