In Denise Wheeler’s presence, every child at Ilalko Elementary school will know straight away that the concerns of their small world count.

Can’t fool a kid about that.

Call it the gift of warmth, Wheeler has the sort a boy or girl could warm his bones around. It shines in her eyes, radiates in her frequent laughter, boils when she swings into her favorite subject.

“I am really just passionate, passionate, passionate about education, particularly public education,” said Wheeler. “It is so much more than a job.

“… Auburn is a nice philosophical fit for me. It goes with my belief system about education and where it’s going. I love the fact that the district has a structure and framework that is established at the central office level, but at the building level, there’s flexibility and freedom to meet the expectations and standards we have for student learning.”

Maybe it’s her Lutheran upbringing, but a slightly salty word tossed in the mix suddenly makes her jump, blush, back up and blurt out, “Oh, my goodness!” And when she does, a hint of Minnesota bubbles up through the crust, even many years removed from her native St. Paul.

Before coming to Auburn, Wheeler had been an interim principal in Shoshoni, Wyo., prepared to retire to Washington after a long and fruitful career that began in 1988. She wanted to be near her beloved daughter and only child, Laura, in Bremerton.

But one day the phone rang. It was a superintendent, an old friend in Montana, advising her of an interim principal position in Shoshoni. No, said Wheeler, she was done with that. But he was persistent.

“And so I applied, and I got the job, and at the end of January I was so excited I called him, and we were talking about something else and he goes, ‘I knew you weren’t ready to retire yet.’ And I said, ‘You’re right, I wasn’t.'”

In fact, there has always been and always will be something of the teacher about Wheeler. “When I was younger, I remember playing school. Even informally with the neighborhood kids, I was doing Smokey the Bear. Maybe that was the beginning of my principalship. I like to organize and lead,” said Wheeler.

But it was love that first struck the match.

“I was going to college in Missoula, and I had an undergraduate degree in forestry. I met my ex-husband who was majoring in education. He said, ‘Let’s go to Alaska after we’re done with college.’ I didn’t know if I would be able to find a job there. He suggested maybe I could get a teaching degree, too.”

And so she did, earning a teaching degree in elementary education. She and her new husband headed to Alaska to teach school. That’s where the thing she had been set on earth to do found her.

“I’ve always liked the teaching component,” said Wheeler. “But there was a defining moment when I realized I wanted to be a principal and said this is the place I need to be. That was when I was in Alaska. We had an administrator who was not elementary trained, he was high school trained. I remember watching what he was doing and thinking, ‘I could do that better.’

“I loved teaching, but what I really wanted was to have a bigger impact. I was teaching very small classes. One year I had seven kids, and another 11 or 13. Teaching first grade, I loved to watch them learn to read, it’s such a magical time,” Wheeler said. “Then I thought, ‘Wow, if you’re an administrator, you can impact two, five or 10 teachers to do something really well then go impact their classes the rest of their career. That was a pretty powerful thought for me, because when I say am passionate, what I mean is I really want to see us do the best we can by kids while we have them.

“I thought, ‘Wow, if I can make that happen and influence groups of teachers, and those teachers go on to impact those groups of kids, it’s sort of a logarithmic, exponential sort of thing going on.’ That’s where my passion is, right there.”