Dr. Tracy Smith Coaching and Consulting

In Memoriam, Gordon F. Vars, Age 88

On Tuesday, January 31, 2012, the middle school community lost one of its five founding fathers. Gordon F. Vars was struck by a car while walking across the street, after being dropped off from choir practice. Vars, who had been a proponent of the junior high school, became instrumental in the move toward middle schools beginning in the 1960s. I had an opportunity to interview Gordon in November 2003. He told me that he made the decision to become an educator while “sitting in foxholes in Europe in World War II reflecting on what [he] wanted to do with [his] life if [he] got out of that scrap with a whole skin.” He decided he wanted to work with people and ideas rather than with things.

Gordon was a widely-acclaimed expert and an articulate spokesperson for core curriculum. He served as the first President of the National Middle School Association and was one of the authors of the first edition of This We Believe, the seminal philosophy statement of the National Middle School Association, which is now in its fourth edition.

According to the 2005 book The Encyclopedia of Middle Grades Education, “Gordon Vars has been a proponent of core curriculum since his first education course as an undergraduate at Antioch College. His career has been devoted to teaching about and advocating for core curriculum.

Vars taught in Kent State University’s College of Education from 1966 until 1993. Kent Schools Superintendent Joe Giancola called Vars “a good friend” who was on the committee that guided Giancola through his doctorate at KSU. “He was a great teacher. He was always very comprehensive and very conscientious with everything he did with his students,” Giancola said. “He kind of walked me through my masters and doctoral degrees. No matter what I turned in, he always had notes in the margins: ‘Do more. Go back. Read more.’ It was always ‘more, more, more,’ to expand the concept.”

The longtime president of the National Association for Core Curriculum, Vars later helped the Kent schools design and develop the curriculum for Stanton Middle School, which opened in 1999.

“He gave us a lot of things to think about and advice when we were building our new middle school,” Giancola said. KSU later hosted the NACC’s annual conference, and Vars “was at the very heart of all of that,” he said. “He was very proper,” Giancola said. “Very conservative, but liberal-thinking as an educator. He was a man of great dignity.”

Editorial by Gordon Vars: Change – and the Junior High, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1965: http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_196512_vars.pdf

Sources for this post:

http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/5153013

http://kent.patch.com/articles/kent-state-professor-emeritus-dies-after-being-hit-by-car

Smith, T.W., & McEwin, C.K. (2011) The legacy of middle level leaders: In their own words. Information Age Publishers: Charlotte, NC.

Additional information: http://www.amle.org/Advocacy/MessagesfromAMLE/DrGordonVars/tabid/2578/Default.aspx