John Overbeck

John Overbeck
 

John Overbeck circa 1959...
 

...and today.

A lifetime of preparation  

“I truly believe that my whole life has been a preparation for John Scott Academy,” says school founder and headmaster John Overbeck. “Practically every day I reflect on how some aspect or another of my life has prepared me for the work I’m doing. And it really isn’t work. John Scott Academy is too joyous an adventure to be called work.”

Beginning with the most recent past and proximate preparation, John considers his seven-year association with The Schilling School for Gifted Children to be a singular gift.

“Late in my journey through this life, I was gifted to discover where that journey was taking me,” John says. “One day just after the start of the 1999-2000 school year, I received a call from Sandy Schilling, the founder of The Schilling School. She had gotten my name from a colleague and dear friend, Nancy Hemminger. It seems a Schilling teacher had suddenly resigned, and would I be interested in taking a part-time position at Schilling?

“I wasn’t sure. I had been out of teaching for several years and considered my years in the classroom to be at an end. I had my own print communications business and was enjoying the work I was doing. But Sandy is a persuasive woman, and, to make a long story short, she convinced me that I could fit a few hours of teaching each week into my schedule, and that working with these gifted students would be a stimulating adventure.”

Stimulating it was.

“I had never given any thought to being ‘gifted’ – didn’t know what my IQ was and didn’t have much idea what the term ‘gifted’ meant as an educational category,” John says.

He has since learned. There is one day John points to as a day when he knew he was where he belonged.

“It was early in my first year at Schilling. One afternoon I said to the class, only half in jest, that one of my ambitions was to be Schilling’s first 80-year-old faculty member. The last word was hardly out of my mouth when one of my students – Ray Alexander, who is now at Ohio State – piped up with, ‘Mr. OH!, in your case, that’s kind of a short-term goal, isn’t it?’ I think it was then that I knew I was home, that I had found the students I needed to be working with.”

John spent seven years at Schilling, two as a teaching principal.

“They were wonderful years, growing years for me, and the parting was difficult when it came,” John says. “I’ll be forever grateful to Sandy Schilling, to The Schilling School, and to its faculty and students. But the time came when I recognized that my work was with gifted students who had unique learning styles, some of whom also brought other exceptionalities to their educational experience – challenges such as ADD/ADHD, Asperger’s or emotional issues. And I felt that a school of my own was the best way for me to fully implement the work I had set for myself.”

And what about everything that came before 1999?

John began working with young people at the age of 15, as a summer camp counselor.

Then came college, a degree in education, and a career as an activist, a writer/journalist, and a teacher. Also, at a personal level, marriage, two gifted children, a years-long and ultimately successful struggle to overcome depression, and the suicide in 1998 of his son, Martin.

“It’s been a challenging life,” John says. “A life of both joy and tears. But every step has led me to where I am today. I have learned to teach. I can model learning as a joyous, liberating, and enabling activity. I have experienced, both as a student and as a teacher, the frustration and the stultifying ‘somebody please open a window!’ feeling of a standard school experience. And I experienced in my education some wonderful teachers who opened for me the windows of life. Teachers like Father John Scott.”

The windows at John Scott Academy are open – wide open.

“You can’t do without fresh air,” John says. “The lungs, the spirit, and the intellect all need fresh air.”

John is a walker too, a habit he developed walking both with his Jesuit instructors and alone along the bluffs of the Mississippi River during his student days at Campion Jesuit High School.

“We walk every day we can at John Scott Academy,” John says. “Walking is an essential part of the noon break – and the John Scott Academy educational experience. And the walk isn’t just a meander around the neighborhood, but a challenging hike along the Great Miami River or up and down the hilly trails at Harbin Park. I guess that comes from my personal mantra and the school’s: ‘Let’s walk together for a while, you and I.’”

John Scott Academy is John’s ultimate walk – an educational journey the purpose of which is to offer gifted and talented students an education that fits their learning styles, challenging their abilities and pushing out the limits of their horizons.

I must admit here that I ghost-wrote my own biographic sketch. Doing it this way gave me a bit of distance from myself.

John Overbeck