Great Barrington — Jolyn Unruh, Monument Mountain High School English and drama teacher, has won the Kapteyn Prize from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.
According to the foundation’s website, the prize comes from the James C. Kapteyn Endowment Fund, which was established in 2009 to honor the late high school teacher James Cornelius Kapteyn. Kapteyn died in 2007 while playing indoor soccer with friends and colleagues at his alma mater, Deerfield Academy. He spent seven years at the academy serving as an English teacher, sophomore class dean, a coach of both the girls varsity soccer and boys varsity lacrosse teams, and was a faculty resident for a boys’ dormitory.
According to the foundation, the primary mission of the fund is to honor Kapteyn’s memory by “… recognizing and supporting educators, who, like Jamie, offer extraordinary gifts to their students, and promote teaching excellence in the secondary schools within the Berkshire Taconic community.” The Kapteyn Prize itself is awarded to teachers at public and private high schools “… who exemplifies excellence in an array of roles within their school community (i.e. teaching, mentoring, coaching, etc.) and exhibits outstanding character traits.”
As part of the award, Unruh received $10,000, while the school received $2,000 in her honor.
Unruh started out teaching at Monument Mountain High School 16 years ago and started as a half-time theater and half-time English teacher.
She told The Berkshire Edge that she is “a military brat,” and, growing up, she moved 23 times across the country before she was 19 years old. “Both my father and my stepfather were in the military, and my parents went through multiple divorces,” Unruh said. “I went through four different high schools in four years, and sometimes the move was in the middle of the year. I always started school after everyone already had made friends, so it always was a lonely and isolating time for me.”
Unruh said that at each school she attended, she would join the school’s theater program. “Whenever I joined a program, I would find my way to making friends and having a mutual purpose with the people around me,” Unruh said. “But with that said, I was always moving with my family and I fell through so many cracks because of that. I blamed it on the high school itself rather than the experience of my life during those years. My perspective at the time was that teachers weren’t very happy being teachers. So, when my mom was like, ‘You’re going to be a teacher someday because you are built for it.’ And I was like, ‘Why would I do that? They seem to hate their jobs.’”
Over time, Unruh eventually moved to Stockbridge to work for the Berkshire Theatre Festival, which is now known as the Berkshire Theatre Group. “Originally, I was working as an actress at Stage West in Springfield, but I followed director Eric Hill to the Berkshires when he founded the Berkshire Theatre Festival,” she said. “I worked for him as an assistant director and actress. When I had my children, I stopped working in the theater because traveling and auditioning just isn’t conducive to being a good parent.”
Unruh eventually started and operated a regional parenting and family magazine for several years. However, Unruh’s life changed when she went out to dinner with a friend. “My friend brought along another friend who just happened to work at Monument who I’d never met before,” she said. “It was two weeks before the school year started. She told me, ‘Hey, we just lost our drama teacher, and they can’t find anyone to take their position. Would you be interested?’”
In response, Unruh said she was less than enthusiastic about becoming a teacher. “Oh God, not only no, but hell no,” Unruh said. “I thought that because I didn’t like high school, high school students are going to hate me. Why would I ever go back into a high school building after everything I experienced? But then I went home and thought, ‘Oh my God, once the theater program closes down, it’s going to be hard to get that back up and going. It might lose its funding if it gets off people’s radars when they can’t even find the teacher.’ But then I remembered that theater was the reason why I showed up at school, and that’s where I found my people.” Unruh eventually called the school and said she would be willing to be the theater teacher for a year until the school could find another teacher.
“When I walked into the school building, I was scared to death,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I have made the worst decision in my life! Why did I do this to myself!’ I just wanted to run. But by the end of the first day, and then the end of the first week, teaching became the best thing I’ve ever done with my life. This is better than acting, and this is what I was born to do, just like my mother said.”
After years in the profession, Unruh said that teaching, at its heart, is people-oriented. “Young people, especially high schoolers, are on the cusp of leaving their childhood behind and going into adulthood,” she said. “There’s a real need for a person who builds a bridge between childhood and adulthood. Who helps students have a positive high school experience, and also bridges the connections between school and being an adult. There is something really powerful about being part of someone’s growth and progress out into the world. It’s deeply meaningful to me.”
Unruh explained, “I need to feel like I’m doing something that’s supporting the human beings around me because I find it incredibly meaningful … It can be challenging, especially during the pandemic.” She continued, “During that time, people suffered and lost loved ones, and people lost their footing, and it is important to be there for others, even though I was also going through my struggles and suffering. There was something so meaningful about knowing that, while I was going through my challenges, I can also be there for young people who are going through theirs. Teaching for me is about human connection and purpose.”
Unruh said that when she was named this year’s Kapteyn Prize winner, she felt a lot of mixed emotions. “I feel honored because I work with a lot of talented, brilliant, hard-working, loving, and compassionate teachers,” she said. “But there’s a lot of people who deserve to be acknowledged this way. There are a lot of hard-working public school teachers and private school teachers who deserve to be acknowledged who are not. And so I feel pressure on myself to make sure that I’m going above and beyond and that I’m worthy of this award. But I do feel incredibly grateful because it changed my life.”
Unruh added, “[I]n some ways, I kind of grew up at [Monument],” despite having not attended the school as a student herself. “Becoming a teacher is sort of how I became an adult,” she said. “There’s something about taking care of other people, and not being the focus of yourself all the time. Of course, I am a parent too, and the children are the heart of my life. But there’s something about opening my heart up to lots of young people that [has] made me realize that I am an adult who is capable of giving back to the world.”
