‘We’re better together’: Hersey teacher gets students involved with veterans causes

Walk into Jim Miks’ classroom at John Hersey High School and you’ll see and hear students discussing the classics and trying to answer life’s biggest questions face to face and side by side.

The arrangement of tables and chairs in a square — unlike the more traditional placement of desks in rows facing the chalkboard — is emblematic not only of Miks’ teaching philosophy, but view of what he calls “our shared civic life.”

“I moved them this way so that people would look face to face with complexity and compassion,” said the English teacher. “We’re better together. We’re smarter together.”

The educator, track and field coach and veterans advocate — one of the most familiar and popular faces in the classrooms, hallways and gymnasiums of the Arlington Heights school — has formed bonds between the school community and the community at large. For at least a decade, Miks has been the organizer of a series of home build projects for disabled veterans, fundraisers, exhibits, walks and other events that foster civic education and a “your community is your country” spirit, he says.

“When you look at all the polarization and division that comes out on national news, local community building, to me, is also country building. This is our country,” he says.

Of a recent school coat drive, he said: “To me, that’s patriotic. Taking care of each other is patriotic.”

Miks is being honored for his dedication to the school and community this month with an Arlington Heights Hearts of Gold award. Chosen by the village’s special events commission, his award in the Heroic category recognizes a person whose actions have changed the trajectory of another’s life.

Miks has helped shape hearts and minds since he began his career as an aide and tutor in the Hersey school library in 1993. He got hired as a teacher at nearby Buffalo Grove High School the following year, then returned to Hersey in 2001.

His work on veterans causes began in earnest in 2014 when he met Army Sgt. Jason Smith at a Northwestern football tailgate. Smith, who had lost both of his legs two years earlier after stepping on an explosive device in Afghanistan, would be the recipient of a new home being built from the ground up by nonprofit A Soldier’s Journey Home.

Miks asked Smith to speak to an all-school assembly that winter, when students presented an $18,000 check for the cause following a gingerbread house building competition and related fundraising events.

Similar veterans visits and fundraisers continued yearly until the pandemic, with upward of $100,000 raised for the home builds in addition to donations of materials and labor.

In 2019, Miks enlisted students enrolled in geometry construction courses at Buffalo Grove and Rolling Meadows to piece together walls and roofs that were shipped to Brunswick, Georgia, and assembled into 30 tiny homes and a community center for a new veterans village.

Hersey students still raise money, and Miks helps out at yearly house builds, which have taken him to Texas, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Greg Padovani, chairman of the Veterans Memorial Committee of Arlington Heights, nominated Miks for the Hearts of Gold award.

“You have to be in the school gym with 2,000 high school students, and he brings in the veteran and they go nuts, and they stand and they clap and they just cheer like crazy,” Padovani said. “It gives you goose bumps.”

Miks harnessed that energy into the home building projects, Padovani said.

“All that is Jim organizing, coordinating, leading kids and other people,” he said. “Jim is the spark plug behind all that.”

Last fall, Miks brought the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’s 9/11 NEVER FORGET Mobile Exhibit — a traveling museum of artifacts from ground zero — to Hersey. The experience connected students with retired New York City firefighters who were there on Sept. 11.

“When you look at all the information that’s on phones, it doesn’t love you back. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t build anything. It takes care of itself with an algorithm,” Miks said. “And when you look at the kids touring that truck, face to face with people who were there telling stories about families and neighbors, it was different. It was hitting differently. And I thought, ‘We gotta do more of this.’”

“Face to face still works. It just works great.”

In 2022, Miks was instrumental in bringing the Portrait of a Soldier exhibit, which features more than 300 hand-drawn portraits of Illinois service members who died in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries since Sept. 11, 2001.

Miks has also organized groups of students to walk in Arlington Heights’ annual Memorial Day parade and walks hosted by Palatine veterans support organization Salute, Inc.

“Jim is everywhere. How he does it, I just don’t know,” Padovani said. “If there’s a veteran related or patriotic event going on in our town, Jim is always involved somehow.”

A look back at Miks’ upbringing presents a clear picture of what inspired his life in and out of the classroom.

His father was an Army MP in Vietnam. His mother worked as a grade school librarian; a good storyteller who always looked for the meaning in things, Miks said.

His grandparents spent their Sundays at the VA hospital in North Chicago, giving veterans rides to and from church and picnics.

His great-aunt was a Dominican nun.

Irish Catholic on his mom’s side of the family and Slovenian on his dad’s, Miks says he learned from both to be grateful for what you have and make the most of your gifts.

“Both sides: Service. Both sides: Gratitude. Both sides: Make the world better. All of that resonated with me,” he said. “And it all had to do with teaching and service. I was lucky to have such great people.”

He says he was further inspired by good English teachers and football coaches at Hinsdale Central High School, and then at the University of Dayton, where part of the school’s mission has always been to use knowledge to make the world better.

Miks isn’t a veteran himself. And he’s not a sponsor of any formal type of club related to veterans advocacy, so he doesn’t get a stipend from the school.

“All of these veterans or patriotic initiatives that he’s at the heart of — they’re purely from his heart, from his belief in the need to imbue the students with a sense of patriotism and history and appreciation for the people who sacrificed to give them their freedoms,” Padovani said. “He’s doing this out of the goodness of his heart. … He’s probably one of the most inspirational teachers I’ve ever met.”

Curriculum vitae: Jim Miks

Age: 54

Residence: Lake Forest

Hometown: Hinsdale

Occupation: English teacher at John Hersey High School

Education: Bachelor’s degree in English Education from University of Dayton, Master’s degree in Liberal Arts from University of Chicago

Activities: Veterans advocate, Head Girls Track and Field coach