Honoring Debbie's Work

Veterinary school was in Khristi Bates’s future. Then, a transformative experience abruptly changed the trajectory of both her career and her life and enabled her to find her true professional calling.

 

“In my teens, I had an opportunity to work in a vet clinic for a while,” said Bates, Collegiate’s new Lower School Head. “I loved it until the day they asked me to go with them to the Humane Society. I said, ‘Sure, what are we going to do?’ They answered, ‘Put dogs down.’ I said, ‘I can’t do that.’ It wasn’t in my DNA. That was a real deal breaker for my 15-year-old self.”

 

One door closed, you might say, but another quickly opened.

 

“My mom was a schoolteacher,” Bates said of Vicki Willingham, who taught first grade for 26 years. “I’d grown up in the classroom with her. I’d played teacher my entire life. I’d started babysitting as a 12-year-old. It’s been who I am from the very beginning, so when the veterinarian thing didn’t work out, the natural progression was teaching.”

 

Bates spent her formative years in Hutchinson, Kansas, and attended Morgan Elementary, Liberty Middle, and Hutchinson High School.

 

“I have very fond memories of coming up through school,” she said. “It was a small community. I went to school with these kids all my life, K-12. What’s so special about independent schools is that you have that same sense of family.”

 

After she graduated from Kansas State (BS in education), Bates moved to Shawnee Mission, near Kansas City, and taught second grade at Roseland Elementary and kindergarten at Brookwood Elementary, then at Bel Air Elementary in Athens, Texas. In 2007, she returned to Kansas (Wichita) to teach fourth and later fifth grade at The Independent School, her introduction to education outside the public domain.

 

In 2014, she became head of the lower school at The Independent School, a post she held for four years before she moved to San Antonio where she headed the lower school at Saint Mary’s Hall for seven years.

 

Then came the opportunity at Collegiate.

 

“What really sold me is that when I visited, it just felt right,” she said. “Collegiate is community centered. It’s family centered. All the pillars are here that made me think this was the right place.”

 

Bates and her husband Brent, a field training manager for a pharmaceutical company, have four children: twins Dylan (a surgical resident at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha) and Cameron (a first-year student at the Texas A&M Law School in Fort Worth); Ryleigh (a Kansas State senior); and Braedyn (a Collegiate freshman).

 

“In both of our massive moves, we’ve involved our children,” Bates said. “The first time, we were in a minivan on the way to Disney World when we got the call about moving to San Antonio. The kids were, ‘You’d be crazy not to take it.’ This time, we had to call everybody. Again, it was, ‘Mom, you have to do this. This is amazing.’ We had long conversations with our youngest son because we’d be transplanting him and bringing him to a new school. When he visited in April, he said, ‘Absolutely we’re going to do this.’”

 

Though she’s embarking upon her third division-head role, Bates didn’t get into education to become an administrator, she said. Instead, it came with the natural evolution of a life journey that included leadership roles in high school and college and her desire to expand her professional horizons in ways that would impact others.

 

“The seed was planted because I worked with some really good administrators,” said Bates, who earned a graduate degree in elementary education from Mid-American Nazarene University. “I thought, How can I give back? because I loved developing teachers into the best versions of themselves. It’s ingrained in me to love and mentor children, but I’ve loved helping my colleagues. I love thinking high level and figuring out how we can improve and implement across the divisions and improve the school.” 

 

That said…

 

“It’s hard to step out of the classroom because I really loved being with the kids,” she said one morning recently as she prepared for the upcoming faculty meetings. “My brain still functions so much in that way, even when I’m creating content, which are lesson plans, if you will, for the opening days with the teachers. That’s my opportunity to get in there and instruct.

 

“Everything is centered on the kids, so when I’m sitting there thinking about what we need to accomplish as adults, it’s centering on what the adults need to get to the kids. It’s always student centered. Everything comes back to the kids. Is this what they need? Are we acting in a way that’s best for kids?”

 

So…

 

“I think I never really came out of the classroom,” she added. “It just changed. What I love about being an administrator is that I get to think big picture [about the students] and make sure that [thinking] impacts them in the best way.”

 

Bates succeeds Debbie Miller, a Collegiate icon who passed away this past Feb. 16 following a courageous battle with pancreatic cancer. She accepts the opportunity with humility and, truth be told, a measure of emotion.

 

“I know that Debbie was beloved here,” she said. “Her [30-year] seal is outside this office. Her name is on the [recently christened Miller Bridge spanning the creek]. I love that and understand that because I’ve come from two schools that have deep roots and people who have impacted them in deep and meaningful ways. My goal is to honor Debbie’s work and keep it moving forward in a way that she would be proud.”

~Weldon Bradshaw