Engelbrecht retires from Calvary Lutheran High School

John Engelbrecht, left, shakes hands with Gerry Wolf, right, at a Engelbrecht's retirement party Saturday at Calvary Lutheran High School in Jefferson City.
John Engelbrecht, left, shakes hands with Gerry Wolf, right, at a Engelbrecht's retirement party Saturday at Calvary Lutheran High School in Jefferson City.

When John Engelbrecht started at Calvary Lutheran High School in 2007, the school occupied office space at Lincoln University and had a handful of students.

Now, the school in Jefferson City has expanded into its own campus on 23 acres and has nearly tripled its enrollment.

Engelbrecht, 63, saw the school through eight years of change and helped build traditions. It's "bittersweet," but he decided to retire this year and was celebrated at the school on Saturday for his time as executive director.

He came to Calvary a couple years after the high school began offering classes and had helped create a Lutheran high school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, prior to moving to Jefferson City.

One of his first administrative jobs was at St. Paul High School and College in Concordia, Missouri, where the traditions were deeply rooted at the 100-year-old school.

"(At St. Paul) it was always 'we do it this way because we've always done it this way,'" he said. "I thought it'd be exciting to start a school. When you start a school, you have to begin traditions. There is no culture within a school. I went from 'we've always done it this way' to 'why do we want to do that?'"

Traditions drive the older schools, but it's important to evolve some of the way schools do things without losing the culture of the school and the basis of what the school is built on, he said. When developing a brand new school, Engelbrecht got to start from scratch, an exciting endeavor.

His interest in secondary education stemmed from having a bad high school experience himself.

He attended a Lutheran elementary school growing up and then moved into a public high school in Kansas. Those years were tumultuous times. While he was in high school, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Because of all the political activism, there was a lot of racial tension in his high school.

"The students don't understand the blessing they have here," he said. "They have lockers that don't have locks on them because they trust each other."

He wanted to build Lutheran high schools with a climate that all students felt safe, a place where they weren't fearful like the experience he had.

The faculty and himself owe a lot of thanks to the community that drives the school and helped build it from the ground up, he said.

When they moved from Lincoln's campus to their current building, Engelbrecht said there was an outpouring of volunteers who assisted.

Scores of parents and staff packed up the classrooms at Lincoln on a Friday morning and moved everything to the new building in a matter of hours, and classes resumed that Monday.

"It's very humbling," he said. "I like to call a lot of the parents pioneers who trusted us to educate their kids. When you're a school of 50 kids it takes a little courage to say, 'I'm going to send my kids here.'"

Engelbrecht hasn't made any definitive plans as to what he'll do during his retirement. After he leaves the building for the last time in July, he'll make a decision. Some of the options he's pondering are teaching online graduate programs or acting as a consultant with new schools to help them get started.

Without a doubt, he said he'll miss the students the most and his daily interactions with them.

Some of his favorite memories are the milestones he helped orchestrate, including the dedication of the new building, graduations and the first sports games in the gymnasium.