Profile Text: Piper Nicely Edited by: Sam Purkiss Audio Profile: Hannah Kramer
Walking around Storm Lake, Salli Nichols’ granddaughter insists that she knows everyone. In a way, it’s true. As a retired English, journalism, and ESL teacher for Storm Lake High School, Nichols has watched her students grow up and join the workforce in town, growing from nervous students, many only beginning to learn English, to successful and thriving members of society. She emphasizes the love that many of these students have for their hometown. “So many people choose to continue to live here or go to college and come back and a lot of these people are my students,” she said. “They’re business owners. They’re law enforcement.They’re working everywhere in every capacity that you can imagine because they like to.”
Storm Lake born and Alta raised, Nichols moved back to her native town in 1991 along with her husband, Jim. Eventually, the two both found themselves working at Storm Lake High School. She began teaching English and served as the instructor for the journalism and yearbook program, as well as teaching desktop publishing. The need for a Spanish teacher then arose, and Nichols, who had taught Spanish before arriving in Storm Lake, took the job. She and her husband, along with their children, Tyler and Jordan (who later also became teachers), practically lived at the high school. “I feel like I gave my life and soul to this building,” she said. “We called our kids gym rats, which meant that we were there six days a week and then on Sunday we went back to get ready for the next week, and our kids went along and played in the gym.” She laughed at the hectic memories. “It’s a way of life.”
That hurdle of talking to parents about their children leaving them and going to live someplace else was really the most interesting for me, because in our culture we’re so used to ‘everyone graduates’ and most kids don’t live at home…It’s convincing them that not only were their kids going to be okay, but they will thrive and they can always come home. They can absolutely always come home.
During her 23 years of teaching, Nichols touched the lives of more than a few students. She worked with her ESL students, guiding the older students to apply to colleges and helping their families accept the changes to come. She told the story of working with student Celeste Rosas, accompanying her and her family on college tours, translating for her non-English-speaking parents and explaining the college process. “I think the favorite part of my journey with her was not only filling out the papers, but helping her parents understand…that she was not going to live with them,” she said. “She would be going to a different town, going to Oskaloosa, Iowa, and so we went on a road trip, and I took her parents along so they could go on the college visit…We got it done, and so she went to William Penn College.”
Nichols discussed the challenges that faced some of these immigrant families when it came to facing the American educational system. “That hurdle of talking to parents about their children leaving them and going to live someplace else was really the most interesting for me, because in our culture we’re so used to ‘everyone graduates’ and most kids don’t live at home,” she said. “There were many, many stories, and a lot of it has to do with talking to parents. It’s convincing them that not only were their kids going to be okay, but they will thrive and they can always come home. They can absolutely always come home.”
Rosas is now the ELL coordinator for a Des Moines-area middle school and is but one of many of the students that Nichols helped on the path to success. Vu Nguyen, the first Vietnamese police officer in Storm Lake, was one of her “prized students” and received dozens of recommendation letters from her. Families credited her with their children’s success, and she found herself invited to graduation parties and cultural events galore. While at a graduation party for one of her Micronesian students, she was given a flower crown and made to sit at the head of the table in a place of honor. When she tried to insist that they should be celebrating her student and not her, he disagreed, stating, “My mom said this party’s about you, Ms. Nichols, because I wouldn’t have made it through without you, and you’re the one we’re honoring today.” Nichols laughed affectionately telling this story, insisting that it was the student’s own doing.
Nichols spends her retirement marketing for one of her former students’ businesses, Molly & You, a gourmet bread and cakes company. One of her former students brings her a turkey every Thanksgiving, wanting to follow American customs. Yet another was working as an electrician in her house during this interview. She gave advice to a past student about looking for houses outside of Storm Lake so he would have lower taxes, but he insisted that, if he and his girlfriend ever had children, he wanted them to go to Storm Lake High School, where Nichols had taught him. “When you create relationships with kids, they mostly last forever,” she said.
Nichols is a firm believer in “growing our own” when it comes to creating teachers in Storm Lake, encouraging kids who grew up in town to return and teach. She and her husband hosted two students from the University of Northern Iowa in the Teach English to Speakers of Other Languages Program (TESOL). At the end, one confessed to her that she had been wanting to teach overseas but, after working in Storm Lake and falling in love with the area, had decided she wanted to stay in the United States to teach. Nichols was thrilled and encouraged her to apply for a job in Storm Lake. She has hopes that the TESOL Program will push more ESL teachers into Storm Lake High School.
“They’ll come into our building and fall in love with it,” she said.
I think we were also very privileged to have some of the strongest and best and most insightful leaders in our community who saw what needed to happen in order to get us over some of those bumps in the road.
Years later now, Nichols does not regret a single moment of her teaching career. “I really did try to go to school every day for my students. That was my absolute focus.” She found herself motivated to fight for her students, to help them succeed and thrive. “The life of a journalist is somewhat of a lonely life,” she said. “You willfully give your opinions because you are a journalist, but that gives people the right to not agree with you. The life of a journalism teacher is somewhat lonely as well. But, you know, I always say I had kids to fight for, and that made me really happy, so that’s why I was so involved, because I had a lot of kids to fight for.”
Now retired and loving her life in Storm Lake, Nichols reflects on her time there and how lucky she feels to have had these experiences with the school system, with her students, and with the town itself. “I could tell you how lucky…I use that word over and over again, but we feel so lucky,” she said in regards to living in town. “I think we were also very privileged to have some of the strongest and best and most insightful leaders in our community who saw what needed to happen in order to get us over some of those bumps in the road. And they’re going to exist, whether it was the legal system, whether it was the school system, but all of those people were in the right place at the right time, and it all worked out for us, and so we’re all living here and loving every minute of it…So I can’t imagine moving to live someplace else, because it wouldn’t be quite as fun or as heartwarming. This is one of the most heartwarming places to live.”
She smiled. “I like that word.”
