2025 Catholic Schools Week Supplement
In leading students to build community, teacher advises, ‘Be present, be pleasant’
Dan Reichley is quick to help his students in his role as a math and science teacher at Seton Catholic High School in Richmond. (Submitted photo)
By John Shaughnessy
Early in his teaching career, Dan Reichley had a conversation with a veteran teacher that has shaped much of his approach to education. It’s an approach that also offers a valuable way for anyone to live their life.
“One teacher, when I asked for advice about whether to proceed with a project, asked the question, ‘Does it build community?’ ” Reichley recalls. “That is the litmus test for any project. Does it bring people together? Does it foster communion? Having a community prepares the soil and allows the possibility for the seed of Jesus’ Gospel to be sown on fertile ground.”
Reichley has followed that guiding principle in his 22 years as a math and science teacher at Seton Catholic High School in Richmond, both in the classroom and outside of it.
“I think in the classroom God wants me to engage in interactions with the students,” says Reichley, a finalist for last year’s Saint Theodore Excellence in Education Award, the highest honor the archdiocese gives an educator. “I try to give them a glimpse into what I’m thinking, what I’m praying about. We have a list of prayer intentions on the board. They know what’s on my mind and my prayer life, and I know what’s on their minds and their prayer life.”
Having set that foundation of accompanying his students in their lives, he strives to help them do the same for people in their larger community. Heavily involved in the Society of St. Vincent de Paul’s efforts in Wayne, Fayette and Union counties, Reichley invites his students to help in its furniture ministry, picking up donated furniture and then delivering it to people in need.
“I’ve had a lot of students help out with lifting furniture at sometimes inconvenient places and times. Sometimes on Saturday mornings or right after school,” he says. “There’s a lot of people in need of furniture. They’ve just moved into an apartment or a rental house, and they have just enough to meet the payments, but they need furniture. I’ve had a lot of students who have graduated who continue to help with the furniture ministry.”
Reichley also leads Seton students in organizing and conducting an electronics recycling program for everyone in the Richmond area twice a year.
“We’ve diverted a lot of electronic waste from our landfill into an Indianapolis company that recycles it. We hold the event on our parking lot. We have one in the fall and one in the spring. The Catholic community and the wider community are very appreciative of it.”
Reichley is grateful that he has shared his journey as a teacher with his wife Tina and their four grown children.
“It’s been a blessing being a teacher, especially when I think back on having my four kids in this school building with me,” says Reichley, a member of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish in Richmond. “With four kids going through Seton, we’ve always been active. We’re always looking at how to use our resources, our time, our talents and our treasures. So, there’s always a tape measure of should we do this or should we not.”
There are two pieces of advice that he always encourages his students to follow.
“I tell them, ‘Be present, and be pleasant.’ You really want them to be engaged with the people in front of them. And then be pleasant. I tell them they can bring so much joy to their family members, to their siblings, their parents and their grandparents, if they’re just present and pleasant.”
Reichley also advises his students to rely on God in their lives.
“If we cooperate with God, God provides all we need,” he says. “I’m not a gifted teacher by any stretch of the imagination. I see gifted teachers. I work with really good and gifted teachers. I’m OK. But I’m effective, I think, because I cooperate with what God wants me to do.”
For Reichley, cooperating with God always leads him back to building community.
“A lot of students and a lot of people need some accompaniment. It’s a really good word to have in the back of your mind as you work with people, as you walk with people, as you communicate with people in the community.
“Accompanying people, whether it be students, family members, the families of our students or the people in our community who are struggling economically or socially, to accompany them is to be in community with them.” †