Episode 14: Growing Futures in Mooresville: A Conversation with Dr. Jake Allen

Transcription:

Kim Cole

Hi everyone and thanks for watching. My name is Kim Cole. I’m president of the Community Foundation Morgan County and with me today is a guest that hardly needs an introduction. He is wildly popular in our county and especially in Mooresville. He is not a Mooresvillian but has been here more than 20 years, Dr. Jake Allen. Thanks for being with us.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited.

 

Kim Cole

I know, I am too. Lots to talk about today because there’s lots going on in Mooresville but let’s just start at the beginning. I’ve heard that you got here because you were chasing a girl. I did chase a girl. I want that story.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

Yes, so I grew up in Southern Illinois, about 20 minutes or so from Kentucky, that far south and I played baseball in college and my roommate, his roommate dated this beautiful girl named Keely and Keely is from Indiana and so I followed her here and we both ended up in Bloomington.

 

Kim Cole

Well, wait a minute. The roommate dated the beautiful girl.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

That’s a good description. So, the roommate’s girlfriend was roommates with my wife, Keely. Sorry, yes.

 

Kim Cole

I thought we were starting a scandalous podcast here.

Dr. Jake Allen

No, they made the introduction.

 

Kim Cole

Okay, great.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

Yeah, she was a college basketball player. Okay. So, we, she came to Bloomington.

 

Kim Cole

Beautiful, smart, awesome.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

Checked all the boxes and I’m fortunate that she, that I checked her boxes. So, so yeah, so we’ve been married now for almost 20 years, and I have been in Indiana for about 23 years and have been at Mooresville schools for 22 years.

 

Kim Cole

Okay, now I know that you’re skipping over a little bit of your history which is interesting, will be interesting to our viewers, which was you played professional baseball.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

I did; I did. I played a little bit of professional baseball with the Los Angeles Dodgers. And I was in the minor league, so I tell people that I was good enough to get there and not good enough to stay. So, it was a fun experience that gave me a lot of leadership abilities and, and that have carried over into my, into my work now.

 

Kim Cole

I’m sure, no doubt.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

Yeah, yeah, that was a fun part of my life.

 

Kim Cole

I’m sure that’s a great natural connection with the kids, with the students now.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

Yeah, the kids usually enjoy hearing that, but when I show them my, my picture, at one point I heard unrecognizable. So, it quickly humbles me that it was a long time ago.

 

Kim Cole

Kids say the darndest things, right? So, well, so you came to Mooresville then 22-ish years ago and I know one thing that is kind of makes you stand out in your professional career is that you started kind of right at the bottom before you rose to the top in your position as superintendent of Mooresville schools.  So, tell us about, tell us about that transition.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

So, I’m super proud to say that my entire educational career has been at Mooresville schools. When I was at IU Bloomington, when they sent me to do my very first observations, they were at Paul Hadley Middle School, which I later became principal of, and when I did my student teaching, that was at Mooresville High School.  And so, I taught English Lit at Mooresville High School for seven years and then went to the middle school and was the principal at the middle school for, I believe, eight years. And then I went over to central office to be assistant superintendent over finance and operations and then transitioned to associate superintendent and then superintendent. So, I’ve been fortunate to spend my whole career in Mooresville schools and I am truly, truly blessed.  I love it. I am pioneer through and through. So, I identify as a Hoosier. So yeah, it’s been a wonderful experience, and I love the community of Mooresville and Morgan County in general.

 

Kim Cole

Well, that’s fantastic. I know that, likewise, I know your student population especially is very, very fond of you and I know that I’ve, that you’re, you’re hands-on with the kids.  I just opened the Pioneer Blast, the Mooresville newsletter, the school newsletter, and I saw that you were eating some food because you guys have a food science class. Yes. So, tell me about that.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

So, we have a food science class that’s part of our new Agri- science program. We’ve had the Agri-science program for a while, but we now have a new state-of-the-art facility, which is beautiful.

 

Kim Cole

Just opened. Right?

 

Dr. Jake Allen

So just opened a couple months ago. This year is our first year that we have students taking classes there. And so, they, they took raw squid and made calamari.

 

So, I got to take the, I don’t know if you call it, dissect. I had to prepare the squid and then was able to eat the calamari and it was delicious.

Kim Cole

So, we should have probably done the podcast that day.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

It would have been really good. It was very tasty. Our kids are fantastic.

 

Kim Cole

That’s fantastic. So, tell me, tell me what else is going on over there in that building? Because I know there’s a huge diversity of programming there.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

So, there’s also, it houses our construction trades. And as we try to provide more and more opportunities to our students, we have a lot of them that really want to be hands-on and work in the trades, the skilled trades. So, we have part of our building focuses on, on construction and plumbing and HVAC and electrical. And so, what they have done the past couple of years is they have built a tiny home.  And so that way the students can get their hands on all aspects of construction and that home building projects. And so, get some, some learning and foundation and skill there. And so that’s really one half of the building.

 

And the other half is the Agri-science where we have everywhere from food science to plant and animal science. They experiment with hydroponics and aquaponics and that’s growing vegetation from fish, from byproducts of fish to put it nicely. And then, but we have a greenhouse there and the kids just love it. And it’s a big lab. It’s just a big science lab. So it’s fun for them to get hands-on and experiment. Then the other side, like I said, with the construction trades, they’re hands-on and excited. And a lot of us are just having more fun learning with hands-on experiences.

 

Kim Cole

Right.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

And so that’s a wonderful that we have the facilities to do that. So, kudos to our board and our community. We’re proud of it.

 

Kim Cole

Well, it sounds like you should be. I said probably the kids in the food lab can take lunch to the kids making the mini home.

 

 Dr. Jake Allen

There you go. And it’s a great relationship. And they, they have even grown food for our food pantries.

 

Kim Cole

Oh, that’s fantastic.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

We kind of had a seed to serve where the students were able to grow the food and then go serve community members at our food pantry.

 

Kim Cole

I personally love that. Being in the business of serving the community. If you can plant that seed early, that is, that’s fantastic. So, I know that in your time as superintendent especially, you have tried to grow the children, the learning for the students in diversity of programs and just besides the lab. So, tell us more about the changes.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

I have to start off by giving all that credit to Holly Fry, our assistant superintendent of curriculum instruction.

Kim Cole

Also, on our board.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

A wonderful, wonderful person and a big, huge part of our success. Casey Gibson, who’s our director of curriculum instruction, the principles that implement it. So, a lot of people are doing the work, but, but the goal is to provide as many opportunities to our students as possible.  We have various amounts of pathways. They call them the three E’s. Enlist, enroll, or employ. So, for our enlistment, we have a JROTC program that’s new and has doubled in size over the past year.

 

Kim Cole

Oh, that’s fantastic.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

So, we’re going to see our enlistment grow. And then for our employment, that’s where the construction trades come in. The plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and there are many others along with that. Culinary arts, cosmetology, and then on the enrollment side, we have everything from engineering to health, science, programming. There are multiple, multiple pathways for students to find a passion. We have roughly 50 advanced placement college credit classes, dual credit classes. Partnerships with Ivy Tech and Indiana University. So, our goal is to provide as many opportunities as possible so that our kids find something they can connect to. Because we all know that when we’re passionate about something, we’re far more eager to learn and to dive into it. And it’s not so much work as it is a pleasure as well. So, we want to provide as many opportunities as we can to our students.

 

Kim Cole

I think that’s great. You know, when I was going to school, you didn’t figure it out, you know, for a long time. You just went to college and maybe you would figure it out then. Who knows? So, I think it’s fantastic that, you know, school systems and Morrisville especially is jump-starting that and really getting them to think.  About what they want to do, what makes them happy. They get to try it out. That’s all good.

Dr. Jake Allen

Education has really come a long way from the one-size-fits-all model. And we have really grown. Also, we know that not every kid needs to go to college. College is wonderful and leads to many opportunities. But so do all kinds of other pathways and working in the trades. And even being an entrepreneur yourself and finding your own path. So, we’re trying to encourage that as much as possible and provide those options. Like I said, it’s simple to boil them down to three. But within those three, enlist, employ, enroll, there are a ton of opportunities for each one of our students to find something that they’re passionate about. And we’ll continue to get better and grow that.

 

Kim Cole

Sure. That’s fantastic. And I know too that, you know, Community Foundation, we have a fantastic partnership with you. And we had given you a grant, I believe, in 2024 for the Student Resource Center at the high school. I toured that last summer.  Was very impressed. Yes. Tell us a little bit about that.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

Well, first, thank you for the partnership and thank you for the grant. So, the Student Resource Center, that is a place where our students can get help with their college, career readiness goals. So, they can actually receive advisement and resources for that.

 

It’s also a place that they can go to receive resources if they need food resources or if they need other hygiene resources. That’s a place that they can go in and it’s a trusted place for them to connect with an advisor and get help that they need. So, thank you so much for funding that. It’s a lot of help to our kids.

 

Kim Cole

Yeah. It was money well spent. And just so the viewers know, you know, anytime that you make a donation to the Community Foundation’s unrestricted account, these are places that that type of facility is where those dollars grow, where those dollars go. We not only grant money to nonprofits but also to the school systems. And we do provide a non-competitive grant at the beginning of every year to all school systems. And this year it was $3,000. We have completed our gift eight requirement and so we were able to get a million dollars from Lilly. So next year that’s going to be a bigger check. So, tell us what you did with the $3,000.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

So, thank you again. We did a one book, five schools for an early literacy focus. And so, I think that’s what I forgot what the name of the book was, but it was a wonderful book about a robot. And so, I read it as well and read to the kids. And so, it was an early literacy initiative. So, thank you so much. We were able to get books in the hands of all our elementary schools and be on the same page, pun intended. So, it was a great opportunity for students and staff and we love it. So, thank you.

 

Kim Cole

That’s great. Right. Great. Like I said, I know the check is going to be bigger this year and we’re going to continue to grow at the foundation so that we can do more for you.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

We appreciate you guys so much. You do so much for us and it’s an opportunity for me on behalf of Mooresville Schools to thank you.

 

Kim Cole

Well thank you and thank you for being here today. We appreciate it.

 

Dr. Jake Allen

Thank you for having me.

 

Kim Cole

 Uh-huh. Thanks.