New Auburn superintendent keeps achievement in sights

Kip Herren keeps the clipping in a frame in his office. In it a former hell-on-wheels student leaps into a joyous coach Herren’s open arms in sheer exuberance after winning a state wrestling title. Twenty-nine years in Auburn’s schools have put an impressive array of facts and figures at Herren’s fingertips. What there is to know about curricula, testing, education reform and WASL, Kip knows. But that photo is there to remind him what the whole show is about. That kid today is a successful businessman whose wife just gave birth to triplets. “I keep it because that leap reminds me that if you give kids that opportunity first and then you give them the structure and the care, they can achieve,” said Herren, the newly-appointed superintendent of the Auburn School District.

Kip Herren keeps the clipping in a frame in his office. In it a former hell-on-wheels student leaps into a joyous coach Herren’s open arms in sheer exuberance after winning a state wrestling title.

Twenty-nine years in Auburn’s schools have put an impressive array of facts and figures at Herren’s fingertips. What there is to know about curricula, testing, education reform and WASL, Kip knows. But that photo is there to remind him what the whole show is about. That kid today is a successful businessman whose wife just gave birth to triplets.

“I keep it because that leap reminds me that if you give kids that opportunity first and then you give them the structure and the care, they can achieve,” said Herren, the newly-appointed superintendent of the Auburn School District.

Herren’s own life is testimony to the enduring truth of his conviction.

Dennis Kip Herren – his parents gave him and his brother Dee short middle names, he said, so their anticipated feats of sports greatness could fit neatly into news columns – was born in Ontario, Ore., in 1950. He has another brother, Boyd, and a sister Candace.

Herren was 2 years old when polio struck down him and 151 other boys and girls in Oregon’s Malheur County. Doctors put him in an iron lung. He would endure many corrective surgeries over the course of childhood. Today, the only outward sign of that childhood trauma is a slight limp and a shorter right leg.

But what impressed Kip about that experience was how the occupational and physical therapists, the doctors and nurses, worked together as an organization. They fixed in his mind the belief that organizations – including the Auburn School District – can do great things for kids.

Back home, Don and Dorothy Herren were determined to do great things for their son and never to let polio hold him back.

“My dad used to put a dime between my toes, and I got to keep the dime if I could raise my leg up,” Herren said. “After my ninth-grade year, doctors went in and put pins in my toes and cut some of the ligaments to flatten out my foot so that I could have a more normal kind of foot. My dad made the shoe, cut out the toe and put a hard cover on it so I could play baseball with it.”

Kip was a March of Dimes poster boy for polio. An image of his 2-year-old self was glued to a coin can, showing him, bat in hand with legs wrapped up, next to these words: “Kip wants to play ball some day. Please contribute to polio.”

“I never really saw it as a limitation. That never crossed my mind, except when it came to wearing a bathing suit on the beach at Santa Cruz,” Herren said.

In middle school, Kip found an aptitude for wrestling. He calls the sport “the great equalizer” for the little guy.

“I was little and I remember as a 95-pounder in my freshman year the captain of the football team, a 220-pound running back, a senior, comes over and tries to do the traditional thing and wrestle me into the garbage can, and I recall wrestling him into the garbage can,” Herren said with a laugh.

Kip wrestled in high school in California, placed at state three times and finished with a 108-17 record. He wrestled at San Francisco State where he compiled a 130-19 record. He was an assistant coach at SFSU from 1974-1976.

In 1979 Herren and his wife, Julie, were living in East Wenatchee where he’d landed his first job out of college as an assistant wrestling coach.

Three years into that job Herren, by then a new father, needed a teaching job. Auburn was looking for a wrestling coach, and he was away at National Training Camp, so his wife filled out the application pulled together the letters of reference and sent in the package while he was away at National Training Camp. But she didn’t tell him.

“So I come home at the end of spring break and I get a phone call from Auburn saying, ‘We have been trying to get hold of you, we want to interview you for the job here.’ I said ‘wow, great,’ and I didn’t want to act like I didn’t know what I was talking about. So as soon as I got the call, I called my wife and asked her what she had done, where was I applying.

“… I walked into the interview and man, it was like I was interviewing for the superintendent of schools! There were a dozen people sitting around a table, the chemistry teacher, football coach, athletic director, the head of the English Department. I was impressed with the level of scrutiny.”

He got the job.

“I am so thankful to Julie for doing that. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

We took to Auburn right away. It’s been a great place to raise our kids, Dennis, Ruthie and April. My son fulfilled my dream of being a state champion by becoming a state champion, then a national champion at Simon Fraser. He’s also a very talented violinist.

“Ruthie was an all-around cheerleader, loved by everybody. This has been our home and is now our kids’ home. I am very fortunate.”

His greatest influence and inspiration is April, born with severe autism.

“There isn’t anything in my life that’s shaped me more than to have a daughter with a severe learning disability. My doctorate in 1992 focused on autism study, and I did my dissertation on the current status of public education for children in the state of Washington with autism.

“… I was really looking for as much as I could to try and help my daughter and other kids. That was really the ultimate driver for having a capacity for loving and caring for a greater range of kids and family and people,” Herren said.

When Kip and Julie moved to Auburn, the rest of the Herren clan, including his brother Dee and his parents began migrating from Santa Cruz. His parents live today at Rio Verde Mobile Estates.

For the next 10 years Herren taught economics, history and physical education at Auburn High School.

As head coach, Herren compiled a 139-28-1 dual meet record. Thirty-two kids placed at state, including eight state champions. His teams won many league and regional championships and regularly finished high at state. His teams finished in the top 10 nine times in his 13 years and were twice academic state champions.

Herren was elected AAA Coach of the Year in 1986. He served as vice president of the Washington State Wrestling Coaches Association from 1985 to 1989. He also was heavily involved in freestyle coaching.

‘Here to develop kids’

But the AHS wrestling program wasn’t so much about winning, it was always about what it could do for kids.

“When I was a coach at AHS, Gene Cerino and I set goals. We asked the mayor, we asked the superintendent, we asked the school board, we asked the parents, what do you want this wrestling team to accomplish? Because winning a title, winning a match is not why we are spending all this money,” Herren said. “We’re here to develop kids, to do what we can do to make them better people. Anybody can coach a team, the question is, ‘Can you build a program that creates scholarships for kids?’ ”

In 1989, Herren became AHS’s dean of students. He served as AHS assistant principal from 1990 to 1992 and its principal from 1992 to 1997. He made the move to administration in 1997 as associate superintendent and in 2001 was promoted to deputy superintendent with overall responsibility for curriculum instruction and assessment and supervision over the district’s principals.

“Here’s what it was for me. I wanted to be a teacher and coach because I could make a difference for kids. So I see the superintendent position as being critical, just like the principal of Auburn High School,” he said.

“In terms of the kinds of things you can do for kids and how you can support teachers to do the same things for kids, I want to do that as a superintendent. I want to be able to make a difference for all the kids in this community.”

Robert Whale can be reached at

253-833-0218, ext. 5052 or rwhale@reporternewspapers.com