By Dave Person
In 2004, Ian Fish heeded the immortal words of Horace Greeley, uttered 166 years earlier.
“Go to the West: There your capabilities are sure to be appreciated and your energy and industry rewarded,” the veteran newspaper publisher advised “any young man” in 1838.
Fish, a 1998 graduate of Parchment High School, left six years later for a teaching position in the Alvord Unified School District in Riverside, Calif. Almost 20 years later, he is still there, but is serving as assistant director of student services.
“I said … when I got out here I would eventually get into administration,” Fish says. “I also wanted to make sure I gained valuable time in the classroom. …. It only makes an administrator a better administrator.”
Fish, 44, spent his first three years at Loma Vista Middle School teaching earth science before moving to Norte Vista High School in the same capacity. In 2017, he became assistant principal of the high school and two years later he was named assistant director of student services for the school district.
The son of Bert and Dee Fish of Cooper Township, Fish graduated from Hope College, where he majored in earth science and minored in kinesiology.
His first teaching job was for a semester during the 2003-04 school year with the Hudsonville Public Schools, but he fell victim to district layoffs at the end of that year.
The outlook for teaching jobs was gloomy all over the state, he says.
“I remember when I graduated from Hope … (in 2002) school districts were just not hiring people,” he says.
He began looking out of state, with his first offer to teach in Hawaii. He decided he didn’t want to move that far away, so he continued looking. He landed the California job as the result of a job fair at Eastern Michigan University.
The move turned out to be a great one both personally and professionally.
“I met my wife (Candice) at Loma Vista my first year of teaching,” he says. She also was a teacher there, and continues in that capacity.
They have two children, daughter Ensley, 11, and son Everette, 7.
Also since he’s been in California, Fish has earned a master’s degree from Chapman University in Orange and administration credentials from Azusa Pacific University in Azusa.
“I like the position I’m in,” Fish says of his student services assignment, which has him dealing with secondary-level discipline and attendance issues as well as working with homeless students, those in the foster-care system, and those who need help at home because of short-term disabilities. “It’s a unique position in that it’s something different every day,”
Sports has always played a significant role in Fish’s life. He was involved in soccer, football, basketball, baseball and tennis, and also ran track his senior year, at Parchment.
“I was fortunate to go to Parchment, a smaller school, and I could do multiple sports at once,” he says.
He was head softball coach at Norte Vista for 13 years and also coached freshman volleyball for four years and freshman soccer for three years..
“I had to stop when I became an administrator at the school because of the time commitments,” he says.
Although Alvord Unified Schools, with 17,000 students, is small compared to neighboring school districts, it is much larger than the 2,200 students in Parchment when he was there, Fish says.
Still, he says he benefited greatly from his Parchment education and extracurricular activities.
He credits his biology teacher and student counsel adviser Jodie Lugar-McManus with encouraging him in his endeavors and helping him to get where he is today.
“She was super in developing me as a leader,” he says. “She always … pushed me to do good things. … She encouraged me to go beyond what i thought I was capable of.”
He also gave kudos to his soccer coach Kirt Brown who went beyond just coaching a sport. “That guy just cared about us kids,” Fish says.
George Stamas, Fish’s football coach, also was an encourager to his players, in general, and Fish, in particular. Stamas graduated from Hope and inspired Fish to go there too. Fish was a kicker on Hope’s football team, and remembers reporting back to Stamas during breaks from school with concerns about college. He says Stamas put him at ease.
A fourth influence was Bobby Glasser, Fish’s earth science teacher. “He’s the reason I went into earth science because he made earth science, as a class at Parchment, exciting,” Fish says.
