This week’s personality: Ron Lance retires after 33 years in education

LOUDONVILLE ‒ Loudonville High industrial arts and STEM teacher Ron Lance is retiring Tuesday after 33 years in public education.

Lance, 57, has taught industrial arts at Loudonville High since the fall of 1997, and the Introduction to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) class for the past 10 years.

His lifetime of teaching was part of a family tradition. His father, the late Al Lance, taught at Loudonville High and later became principal there, and later still served as superintendent at the Danville Local School District before his death, at age 43, in 1983.

All three of his sons, Ron, John and David, became teachers, all in Loudonville. John later became principal at LHS before retiring for health reasons a few years ago, and David continues as guidance counselor at the school. Their mother, Irma Lance, still lives in Loudonville.

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Ron Lance, a 1984 Loudonville High graduate and a lineman on the 1983 football team that was first to qualify for the Ohio computer playoff rankings, attended Ohio State University, earning a bachelor of science in education degree with a focus on industrial technology in 1988.

His first teaching position was as a permanent substitute teacher at Wooster, which he did from January to June, 1989, when he was hired to a full-time position at the Mohican Youth Center near Loudonville. He taught there for six years, and then took a teaching and coaching post at Ridgedale High School in Marion County.

The first year he worked at Ridgewood he made the daily 65-mile commute to Ridgedale, and the second year he, his wife, Cathy, and two older daughters moved to an apartment in Upper Sandusky, about 15 miles north of Ridgedale.

“While I enjoyed my time at Ridgedale and still have friends I made in my time there, I wanted to return to Loudonville, where my brother John was already teaching,” Lance said. “I kept pestering the superintendent, then Tom Lavinder, and ultimately agreed to interview me.”

Getting back to Loudonville

That was indeed an unusual interview, Lance remembered.

“We met at the Apple Valley Golf Course and he interviewed me while we played, which was very intimidating because Mr. Lavinder was a scratch golfer while I had a handicap of 10. But it worked out. I got the job.”

Cathy was thrilled that her husband was hired at the high school because her mother, Margie Danner, once worked there, ironically with Ron’s dad when he was principal.

At LHS Lance replaced Jon Birkhold, who had been his drafting teacher a decade before, as the woods teacher.

“I actually knew little about woods when I took the job,” he admitted. “My fellow industrial arts teacher, Steve Workman, who was teaching metals classes taught me how to teach woods. We worked together for nearly a decade.”

Asked to mention highlights of his teaching career, Lance reported “for one thing, while we worked with potentially dangerous equipment every day, we never had a serious accident in my classes.

The most humorous memory occurred as teachers had a team-teaching event at Camp Nuhop. When he went through the trust-fall event, his fellow teachers dropped him to the ground. “They didn’t have a good grip,” he smiled, still embarrassed of the incident that happened 20 or more years ago.

Most satisfying was his tutelage of student Brian Koppert, who once told him he wanted to become an industrial arts teacher, and did so, now teaching at Wooster High.

Becoming known as RL at Loudonville High

Today the status of industrial arts in the curriculum of public schools is questionable because of the emphasis on academic subjects, but Lance said the plan for now is to continue his classes and his position.

“Ben Drown, who teaches math at the high school, will take my classes over for the second semester this year, and hopefully someone new will take them next school year,” he said. “An irony is that there is nowhere in Ohio where a college student can earn a degree in education-industrial technology anymore.”

Paralleling his teaching experience both at Ridgedale and Loudonville has been Lance’s coaching experience. He coached both football and baseball at LHS from 1989-2014, including two seasons as Redbird head football coach, and mostly specializing as an offensive line coach.

He also earned the moniker “RL” while at the high school.

“A good friend, Jody Beans, first called me RL, but the name stuck when I first began teaching here with my brother Jon. The loudspeaker would summon Mr. Lance to the office, and we didn’t know which one. So, they started calling for Mr. R. Lance, and that name was quickly modified, by students as well as staff, to RL.

The high school will indeed be different without RL.

Lance and Cathy, finance manager at H & H Custom Homes in Loudonville, have three grown daughters, Allie and Carrie, who live in Wooster, and Valerie, who is in Maine.

Among their immediate retirement plans are to travel to visit Valerie, who lives about 30 miles from Acadia National Park in Maine.

This article originally appeared on Ashland Times Gazette: This Week’s Personality: Ron Lance retires after 33 Years in education