Navy service inspires teacher's lessons at Elmhurst school
Peter Richey has a surprise planned for the Veterans Day 2016 assembly at Churchville Middle School in Elmhurst, and not even the principal knows about it.
About 40 minutes into the assembly, the teacher apologizes for an apparent technical glitch with a video of Thomas Goettsche, an Army paratrooper serving in North Carolina.
His sister, Reyna Rogers, a Churchville student, is waiting to hear from her older brother who hasn't been home in six months. And then people suddenly start clapping, and there's Goettsche.
But he hasn't shown up on the video screen. He's walking into the gym and into his sister's arms.
Their tearful embrace is one of the most memorable moments from the Veterans Day ceremonies Richey has organized every year for nearly a decade.
While other schools may invite a veteran or two to speak to students, Richey plans an elaborate observance.
He works with students and teachers to pay tribute to their loved ones who have served. But Richey also runs the assembly as a token of appreciation for his six years in the Navy.
"He truly believes that going into the military saved him and gave him a whole new life," Churchville Principal Gina Reeder says.
Keeping doors open
Before he enlisted, Richey was a directionless teen. He had moved back in with his parents in their southern Illinois home after a year at Auburn University.
He wasn't happy in college - and it showed. He only "occasionally" went to class.
"I didn't know who I wanted to be," he says.
The turning point came after he had been doing odd jobs around the house and at a local cemetery cutting grass.
"I don't want to be doing this," he remembers thinking. "I need a way to make my life better."
His father had served in the Air Force. His grandfather was an Army veteran. At 19, Richey was drawn to the Navy.
"I wanted to see the world," he says.
Richey served two deployments. One rebuilding mission in East Timor in Southeast Asia may have planted the seeds of a career in education.
The country was engulfed in civil war, and Richey and his team were fixing up what they could at a school. Richey was struck by the students and their pride in a cinder-block building that had no windows and no doors.
And that left him wondering, "How do you instill that in kids?"
His mother, grandmother, aunts and uncles were all teachers. Growing up, he thought the job wasn't for him. Now it's his passion.
So when he gives his own students career advice, Richey reminds them to keep an open mind about their future and opportunities they may not even know they want yet.
"When you start closing doors, you're limiting the options you have in life," he tells his students. "Education is going to be that path that keeps doors open."
While he was stationed near Philadelphia, Richey started attending Montgomery County Community College. By the time he was honorably discharged from the Navy as a second class petty officer, he already had earned his associate degree in education.
'Be true to you'
In his classroom, Richey wants his students to approach their work with the same mindset he developed in the Navy.
"You have to be able to take ownership for your actions, how you want to instill pride in everything that you do because it's a reflection of who you are," he says.
His school uniform - bright shirts, patterned pants (often really, really bright shirts and patterned pants) - is a reflection of his high energy, his principal says.
Outside school, his wardrobe draws stares, but he doesn't seem to mind because it demonstrates the authenticity he encourages in his students.
"It's the message I try to give them, especially at this age when they're so concerned about what other people think," he says.
"Don't worry as much. Be who you are, and if people don't like that, just let it slide off and keep going about who you're going to be, because if you're not true to you, then you're never going to be true to anyone else. I think the Navy helped me understand that, because if I was trying to be someone else, it just came off very fake."
'Giving back'
As soon as kids return to school in August, Richey begins enlisting students to help him pull off the Veterans Day assembly.
Bob Pruyn, a Vietnam veteran whose granddaughter attends Churchville, says the event always ends up topping the previous year's ceremony.
Friday's assembly, live-streamed online, was no different. Richey produced a video montage showing Churchville students - roughly 600 of them - thanking veterans.
Students read essays. The choir, band and orchestra performed patriotic anthems. And veterans received a special gift that recreates a military tradition.
For the honored guests, Richey designed challenge coins with the school's logo on one side and the emblems of all five military branches on the other. Awarded in the military, the coins recognize a "job well done," says Richey, who received one from his command master chief.
"It's again building that connection of the school into something that brings them back to their service days," he says.
Richey doesn't wear his uniform from his Navy days at the assembly.
"I try not to put myself in any kind of light there," he says. "That's not for me. That's me giving back."
Curriculum vitae
Name: Peter Richey
Occupation: Eighth-grade teacher at Churchville Middle School, Elmhurst
Residence: Lombard
Education: Associate of arts in secondary education from Montgomery County Community College (Pennsylvania) in 2004; bachelor of arts in middle level education from Illinois State University in 2008; master of arts in curriculum and instruction from Northern Illinois University in 2012; and master of arts in mathematics education from National Louis University in 2013
Military career: Six years in Navy