Falls City teacher to receive St. John Cantius award
By Deacon Matthew Hecker, Ph.D.
for the Register
Linda Kirkendall is the 2024 St. John Cantius Secondary Educator of the Year award winner. In May, she retired after a teaching career spanning 46 years at Sacred Heart School in Falls City.
Linda Kirkendall grew up near the small town of Western, Neb., where her parents farmed.
The oldest of three children, she started school in a one-room schoolhouse. She recalled there was no water or restroom, so students used an outhouse.
“The teacher had to bring water from home to the school,” she said. “She would also bring a canner and put it on a hot plate. Our parents would send us our food in glass containers. She would turn the hotplate on around 10:30 to slowly warm up our food so we all had hot lunches.”
After the third grade, Kirkendall briefly attended Western Public Schools. After the passing of her father, the family moved to a farm with her grandmother and she graduated from Milligan Public School.
“My mom believed that we all needed an education beyond high school, so she started pushing me in my sophomore year to begin making a plan.”
She decided to study business, but during her junior year, the high school superintendent wanted her to work with a young man in junior high who had some physical and mental disabilities.
“I worked with him an hour every day, and I think that’s when I decided I wanted to work with children, not numbers,” she said.
Following high school graduation, Kirkendall was offered an athletic scholarship to Peru State College, for volleyball and track. She went and began studies to be an elementary educator.
During the first semester of her sophomore year, a literature instructor “pulled me in around the middle of the semester and said, ‘You need to be in the high school with high school kids and you need to be in English.’ That’s how I became an English major.”
After finishing at Peru State, Kirkendall interviewed at a few public schools.
“But one Sunday, I was going through the paper and there was an opening at Falls City Sacred Heart. My roommate was Catholic and I was Methodist at the time (she later became Lutheran). She dared me to apply. I said, ‘they’re never going to hire a non-Catholic,’ but she said, ‘just try it.’ So I applied.”
Kirkendall had a good friend at Peru State who knew Sister Hilaria Phipps, S.C., then the principal at Sacred Heart.
“He knew I’d applied and he told Sister Hilaria to hire me, and evidently, she believed him. I never had an interview!”
When Kirkendall visited the school for the interview, instead, Sister Hilaria already had people lined up to provide housing for the young teacher.
“She said, ‘Let’s walk through the building then we’ll sign this contract.’ That was my interview.”
Thus, Kirkendall launched a nearly five-decade career teaching English at Sacred Heart, including coaching girls basketball for a short time, volleyball for 13 years “and I’m still coaching track. And the beauty of it is my son (Tim) now coaches with me.”
Kirkendall and her husband Doug raised two children, sons Tim and Kyle, both of whom attended and graduated from Sacred Heart. In 2023, with Doug’s health failing, Kirkendall, switched to teaching part-time.
When asked about the length of her career at one school, Kirkendall admitted, “When I came here it was to get started. My hope was always to move closer to where my mom and grandma were (by Western). I decided I was going to give it five years. But four years into it, I married Doug who I had known from Peru.”
Doug was a farmer in the Falls City area, and “you don’t move when you marry a farmer,” said Kirkendall. “I guess after a while, I didn’t want to move.” But more than that, “I’ve been able to talk about Christ in my classroom for 46 years. I don’t know how I would handle not being able to talk about how important your faith is. Honestly, I can’t see how I could have been the teacher I was, without the fact that I could talk about faith. That was always an important part of my class.”
Kirkendall is proud of the fact that she was an insistent grammarian, and “I made my students write in cursive.”
“A teacher’s true success happens when students come back after they graduated or moved on and share their success story with you and say, ‘I would never have gotten through this without your help,’” she said. “I always believed there was so much education beyond the books, and I made sure that every lesson I taught that the students realized how it fit into their day-to-day life.
“I loved teaching seniors the novels ‘The Power and the Glory’ and ‘The Screwtape Letters,’ she continued. “The wonderful conversations we shared about faith while reading those novels and how faith is the foundation our lives are built on was a wonderful way to end their senior year.”
Kirkendall also was the sponsor of the community service group at the school called Helping Hands.
“I realized immediately that volunteering is what helps make private schools be successful, and that being a good volunteer should be a lifelong goal. I spent many hours with many students volunteering in the school, church, and community, and those are hours that were truly well spent.”
She added that after her husband’s death in 2023,” it was the Sacred Heart family that held me together and gave me purpose.”
“I will never be able to repay them,” she said, “but they helped me end my career of teaching on a good note. I love the students and enjoy going back to see them and support them anyway I can.”
St. Paul writes in 1 Cor. 13: “If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.” Kirkendall gave 46 years to teaching English, coaching, and faithfully sharing the love of Jesus Christ with her students and the community of Falls City Sacred Heart School.
Kirkendall will receive her award Oct. 13 at the third annual “Saints & Scholars” dinner to celebrate Catholic schools, educators and benefactors in the Diocese of Lincoln. All are welcome to attend. See www.goodshepherdscholarship.com for more details.
