From Dyer to Tri-North: a school that feels like home and forms lasting relationships
Emily Cox
Editor's note: This story is the second in a two-part series about the future and past of Tri-North and Dyer school.
Every third Wednesday of the month, the Dragon Ladies meet.
Susie Clendening stayed in touch with friends from her time at Dyer Junior High School in the 1960s and wanted to gather her girlfriends from the Dyer Junior High School freshman class of 1966 together.
So in February 2015, after more than five decades of friendship, a group of around six or eight women got together in Bloomington. It was so fun they decided to keep it going once a month, inviting and tracking down more Dyer alum. The school's mascot was a dragon, so the women adopted the group name Dragon Ladies.
'What a beautiful school':Seeing new Tri-North Middle School for the first time
"I just thought it was really important that people try to stay connected," Clendening said. "Some people, I think, feel closer to people they went to school with — their close friends — than they even do some of their family."
Tri-North Middle School has most recently been housed in the Dyer building, constructed in 1959, but is moving into a new building for the 2021-22 school year. Within Dyer and Tri-North, strong bonds formed between faculty and students, and friendships have lasted for decades. In the new school building, faculty hope those legacies of pride in the school and a close knit faculty will last for another 60 years.
Initially, gatherings of the Dragon Ladies were held at Bobby's Colorado Steak House. The restaurant closed and the group grew. One woman drives in from Illinois for the luncheons, and as the men from Dyer caught on to the gatherings, they were invited. The husbands of the women joined as well to meet at American Legion Post 18, 1800 W 3rd St at 11:30 a.m. They make sure to take a photo each time.
On a recent Tuesday morning, Clendening traced her finger along a page in a 1966 Dyer yearbook, The Pagoda, and landed on her photo — Susie Stout. She smiled. On a table next to the yearbook was a white binder that read "Dyer Jr. High Class of 1966" on the front. It's where she keeps track of her freshman class of 1966 — yearbook photos, phone numbers, addresses and email addresses of the former students organized neatly in rows. The girls are harder to find if they've changed their names, Clendening said. She sends out emails to anyone from her class who opts in, letting them know when classmates have died, inviting them to events or sharing fun facts she unearths about the school.
Also tucked in the binder was a book of photos from the monthly meetings of 2015, made by Dragon Lady Connie Zimmer Hardin. One page showed the December ornament exchange. There's always a Christmas party.
People drift apart so often now, Clendening said. Some people end up moving so far they can't get together, but she remembers how when she was growing up, people gathered with their families on Sundays. They made sure to visit their great grandparents. She feels that's been lost.
"I have always been really interested in keeping people together and just kind of keeping them connected," she said.
Remaining connected
Next to Clendening's photo in the yearbook is Lane Sturgeon. When attending Dyer Junior High School, Sturgeon lived at 16th and Dunn in an area called Cherry Hill. If he'd lived across the street, he would've gone to University School, he said, and the bus didn't come out that way, so he and some other students had to walk to and from school each day — in "rain, snow, sleet or shine, whatever."
He felt scared on his first day of junior high, leaving grade school to enter a school where he didn't know a lot of people and would go class to class instead of being in the same room all day. But he noticed the school had a great mix of students.
"A lot of us from all different backgrounds and stuff, we all merged into one thing," Sturgeon said. "We loved the school and we loved going to school there. And I think the teachers and the staff and everyone made that the way it was. And it was a lot of fun."
In the 1964-65 school year, when Sturgeon and Clendening were students, Dyer Junior High School had 34 full-time teachers and 640 students in grades seven through nine, according to "Know Your Teachers," compiled and published by the Bloomington League of Women Voters in 1965. Today, Tri-North Middle School, which has students in grades seven and eight, has around 570 students.
To Sturgeon, important things in life are friends, family, faith and fun.
"Friends was real big at Dyer," Sturgeon said. "And we also were like a family."
To this day, Sturgeon's ties to his classmates are still strong. A friend he met at Dyer has become more of a brother to him. He attends the Dragon Ladies events.
There are a lot of great memories from Dyer, Sturgeon said. He remembers his friend Sherrie Day singing "Downtown" by Petula Clark at a talent show. He remembers going to the gym during lunchtime, where some people played basketball and others danced to Motown music — The Supremes, The Temptations — played on a record player.
"Now you think I'm crazy remembering all this," he said, then laughed.
Even now, the influence of Dorothy King, his "favorite teacher in all the world" who he had for typing and geography, isn't forgotten.
There's also one day of school in particular he'll never forget.
It was Friday, November 22, 1963. He was in the school's library for an English class when the principal called for all the staff.
"Then our librarian and my English teacher come back in and they were both weeping," Sturgeon said. "And my librarian said, 'Kids, in this library, there are a lot of books. And there's a lot of books of history. And one of the things that happened today will be remembered in history. Our president has been assassinated this afternoon.' I'll always remember that."
Students from that era have gone back to the building where their bonds were formed. For a 50th Dyer class reunion in 2016, the alum went back through the school — Tri-North — with the principal at the time. Everything looked so small, Clendening said, and so much had changed.
"I just wonder what the next 60 years is going to hold," she said.
Teaching at Dyer and Tri-North
On a recent Monday afternoon, 90-year-old Helen Sturbaum sat in her Bloomington home. Her cat, Raju, walked into the living room to weave around her feet.
Sturbaum, a member of the Monroe County Retired Teachers Association, taught at Dyer Junior High starting in the late 1960s and continued teaching for a few more years once the school became Tri-North. She taught French and English/language arts.
"You know, it wasn't a flashy school," she said. "We didn't have a huge teachers lounge; it was just a funny little place where we could have lunch. But it was a friendly atmosphere among the faculty."
Sturbaum's room at Dyer had a wall of windows that looked out on West Arlington Road.
"One year when it was snowing really bad, cars were coming down the road and slipping off, sliding off," Sturbaum said. "And we all went to the windows, the kids and I, and watched the cars come down the hill and slide in the snow. You felt connected with the rest of the world because of all the windows."
Sturbaum said the mix of students at the school was healthy.
"What was special about Dyer was there were all kinds of people there, there were all kinds of kids there," Sturbaum said.
They came from different backgrounds and learned to live with each other and get along well, she said.
But because of where the school was, it had a bad reputation, Sturbaum said. It's something former students recall as well.
In 1973, despite angry protests of two Highland Village parents, the MCCSC school board voted to send children living in the westside subdivision to Dyer Middle School the following year, according to a Herald-Telephone article from the time. The board also okayed a "grandfather clause" to permit seventh and eighth graders who could find their own transportation to choose between Dyer and Batchelor Middle School. The option was for students who attended Central Middle School at the time and those who planned to attend Batchelor after Central closed the next fall.
Still, two parents were upset. One man objected to his children attending Dyer because he said the children there came from different backgrounds and family units than Highland Village children. Board president Elizabeth Bridgewaters said, "The purpose of public education is not to uphold social hypocrisies or feelings," and told him he could send his children to private school "where only people of the same caliber are going." Board member Marion Young said he felt the real reason Highland Village residents didn't want their children going to Dyer was because some of the students there may be "poor," according to an article.
Two years after that incident, Bob Austin's career began at University School, back when the district had five middle schools. In 1984, that shrank to two middle schools, and Austin, a band director, was there when Tri-North opened. At that time, it was housed in a wing of Bloomington High School North. He was there when the school moved into the Dyer building as well.
"All the sudden, now you have a band and a choir and an orchestra that wanted to perform in this auditorium," Austin said of the Dyer building. "Well, the stage, for much of that, was too small. And the auditorium had cinderblock walls."
He could clap his hands and count the number of echoes before they faded out. He was among those who worked with administration to get sound control panels that would absorb the sound so there wouldn't be an echo. As the band program grew, he couldn't fit the entire band on the stage. Two thirds of the band were on stage while two rows of the band had to be on the floor of the auditorium.
That meant Austin would stand on the arms of an auditorium seat in the fourth or fifth row of the audience to conduct his band.
Throughout his career, Austin always did other things besides the band. He worked in the computer lab with Apple IIe computers at a time when the thought was people should learn basic programming as a way to become familiar with computers.
"There was a time when the way classes were taught, you had the teacher in the front of the room passing on information to the students and the students were expected to just pick up on that and memorize it and learn it," Austin said. "But everybody began to realize that that does not produce the kind of student, the kind of adult eventually, that is capable of making intelligent, informed decisions."
So several years after he started at Tri-North, he went to a conference in Chicago with a teacher from Batchelor, the other middle school, where they learned about teaching critical thinking. Then the teachers brought the course Critical Thinking Problem Solving, CTPS, to the middle schools.
"It was a class that was devoted to getting the students to think on their own and not to automatically accept and assume that everything was as it appeared to be," Austin said. "We did a lot of fun things. We had the kids working with Bloom's taxonomy and all kinds of ways of looking at the world. We talked about metacognition, thinking about thinking."
Austin said he had a wonderful experience at Tri-North, so much so that he hesitated when he had the chance to help open a brand new middle school, Jackson Creek Middle School. Tri-North was such a good place and was quite special, he said. It was a hard decision, but he did leave to teach at Jackson Creek Middle School when it opened in 1998 and taught there until his retirement in 2012.
"I guess I've been fortunate, in all the schools that I've taught in in the MCCSC, the administration has been very supportive, and when you have that a lot of good feelings and great things can happen," Austin said.
Dyer and Tri-North's legacy
Chris Williams was a student at Tri-North Middle School from 1995 to 1997.
Mathew Worland remembers being around 4 years old and going into Dyer Elementary School with his mom, Ann Worland, who taught there after teaching at Brown Elementary School, which was across from Oliver Winery.
"The school seemed so big, it was huge to a little kid," Worland said.
Neither Williams or Worland ever imagined they'd end up working in that very same building.
For Williams, a social studies teacher, the return to Tri-North came after his mom, who worked for the district, told him about the need for a long-term substitute. He's been teaching at Tri-North since December 2010.
When Worland was in middle school, he came back to the school, by then named Tri-North, for some sporting activities. Then, a few years ago, he came back again for a job interview.
It was such a strange feeling, he said, since he remembered the vague outline of the school but hadn't been in the building for years.
"I didn't realize until I started to interview they were actually building a new school," Worland, who has been an assistant principal at Tri-North since fall 2018, said. "So that was kind of exciting, but also kind of bittersweet because I knew a lot of people have very fond memories of that building, and are very connected to it."
But it's not the building itself, he said. It's the time people spent in it and the people they were with.
As a kid, spending summers in Dyer helping get things ready for the school year, he picked up on how close the teachers were. They worked hard and were very dedicated.
"That hasn't changed," he said. "Walking into Tri-North, it felt familiar. It feels like home. I never felt out of place coming back because for whatever reason, that has transpired across whatever staff is in that building."
Williams said he's always appreciated the tight-knit faculty. Having longtime teachers who haven't sought out other places to teach and two or three teachers who are still there from when he himself was a student is a testament to that, he said. To Williams, the best part of the school is something that hasn't changed since he attended.
"What makes Tri-North so unique is that you're pulling students from all different aspects of the community and from all different types of elementary schools," Williams said. "It's a great melting pot that represents the community as a whole. And it was the same when I was a student. Redistricting has adjusted it a little bit, but it's the same concept."
On Thursday, a ribbon cutting and open house was held at the new Tri-North Middle School building. Clendening and Sturgeon were there.
While it may not feel so important to students right now, Clendening hopes they remember to keep connected to their classmates as years pass. Sturgeon hopes the incoming students won't be shy, will make friends and will study hard.
"Just be involved in whatever you like to do and go full force with it," Sturgeon said. "And I think they'll enjoy those years more than anything. I know that's what I tried to do and I really enjoyed being at Dyer."
Sturgeon, who previously worked in security and was a steel worker, now delivers flowers for Judy's Flowers and Gifts in Bloomington. He sometimes sees people from Dyer while on the job, and he's passed by the site of the old school while driving around making deliveries.
There's a big fence up, so he hasn't seen the destruction of the school. It's kind of hard, but it was just a building, he said.
"Dyer is in our hearts, and we will forever have the memories of that school," Sturgeon said.
Out with the old:Tri-North Middle School demolition
A timeline of Dyer and Tri-North
1959: Binford Junior High School and Dyer Junior High School, offering identical facilities, were built. Dyer was built in the northwest part of Bloomington at 1000 W. 15th Street and Binford in the southeast at 600 S. Roosevelt Street. The schools offered grades seven, eight and nine.
1984: Before 1984, MCCSC sixth through eighth graders were housed in five middle schools. With enrollment declining and the corporation trying to recover from a budget crisis, buildings had to be closed. The five middle schools were consolidated into two large middle schools: Tri-North Middle School and Batchelor Middle School. Sixth graders were moved from middle schools to elementary schools, averting the need to close more elementary buildings.
University, Dyer and Unionville Middle Schools became Tri-North Middle School, which was housed in a wing of Bloomington High School North. It remained there for six years. Batchelor Middle School absorbed students who attended Binford.
Tri-North principal Mike Walsh wrote in a report that "three diverse populations in a totally new school with shared facilities presented us with many concerns, but because of so many positive factors … the move was successful beyond expectations."
The Dyer building changed into Dyer Elementary School and students living in Crestmont public housing moved from Fairview Elementary School to Dyer Elementary.
October 1989: A school redistricting plan was approved by the MCCSC board. The board approved the plan, which would go into effect the next fall, by a 6-0 vote. The need for redistricting resulted from a $20.2 million construction project that includes building a new elementary school near Highland Village, replacing Clear Creek Elementary, renovating Fairview Elementary and expanding Childs Elementary and Dyer Elementary — with the latter becoming Tri-North Middle School.
1990: The new Highland Park Elementary opened its doors and students from Dyer Elementary School began going there. Tri-North Middle School relocated out of Bloomington High School North to the Dyer School building for the 1990-91 school year. The Dyer building became Tri-North Middle School.
April 6, 2001: Manisha Patel had heard people say Tri-North Middle School was filled with poor, rough kids and wasn't the safest place to go. But Patel, a student, said people who said those things had never set foot in the school and had no idea what a safe, positive learning environment the school provides to its economically diverse student population. Patel was one of the students, parents and teachers interviewed by the Indiana Department of Education Performance-Based Accreditation Team in 2001. The team gave Tri-North Middle School a glowing review in an exit conference.
2018: The Herald-Times reports that the MCCSC is replacing Tri-North Middle School with a new building on the school's current site as part of its 10-year construction and renovation plan across the school district.
July 2021: A ribbon cutting and open house is held at the new Tri-North Middle School building, which will open for the 2021-22 school year. A football practice field with a track around it is not expected to be finished until next spring. It will take the place of a retaining wall from the old building that still needs to be demolished so the ground can be leveled out.
Sources: Herald-Telephone and Herald-Times archives, interviews with Dyer and Tri-North current and former faculty, "Know Your Teachers," compiled and published by the Bloomington League of Women Voters in 1965, yearbooks
Dyer and Tri-North: where the names came from
Dyer: Dyer was named for L.E. Dyer, principal at Fairview Elementary School in the 1950s.
Tri-North: In fall of 1984, students from Dyer, Unionville and University middle schools funneled into Tri-North, which was housed in a wing of Bloomington High School North.
Tri-North colors were red, green and white, a combination of one color from each of the incoming schools, with the mascot being the trojans. The committee that chose the colors was headed by Mike Walsh, who was principal of University Middle School before becoming the principal of Tri-North. A report put out by the MCCSC said the committee — which included students, teachers and parents from the three schools — collected potential names for the school. They compiled 30 names, but five were removed before a March school board meeting. The committee narrowed it down to three names: Cascades Middle School, Jefferson Middle School and Tri-North Middle School.
Students from Dyer, Unionville, University and St. Charles, a private school that offers education through eighth grade, selected Tri-North by a 5-1 margin. The name was created to reflect the fact the school took in students from three northern Bloomington and Monroe County middle schools.
Sources: Herald-Times articles from 1984 and 1989
Then and now: highlights of a school
Special features of Dyer Junior High School:
Indiana Limestone exterior
"Little Theatre" type auditorium with 478 seats and stage
25 classrooms
Electronic clock control and program signal system
Intercommunication system which provides for FM and AM radio programs and reports, to all rooms or to selected rooms
Well-equipped industrial arts room and demonstration area, including printing equipment
Science laboratories, project room student work table with gas and electrical connections for each table
Fluorescent lighting throughout
Library with conference room and office
Television conduit connecting all rooms
Special features of the new Tri-North Middle School:
Bedford, Indiana limestone lining the walls
Library media center has a green screen room for video production
31 classrooms, 6 STEAM classrooms
Performance center/auditorium/large group instruction with state-of-the-art lighting and sound equipment, retractable seating with a capacity of 450
Geothermal heating and cooling system
Solar panels on the roof
STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) lab
Collaborative spaces and open concept areas
Apple TVs in many classrooms
Gymnasium with seating for up to 1,400 (floor and bleacher capacity)
Cafeteria with mixed style seating, with seating for over 300 students and a capacity of 427
Lots of natural light