Even though she lives in La Crosse, Ashley Riley hasn’t strayed far from her home town, Great Bend. Currently, her office with Barton County Special Services in Great Bend is located in the same building where Riley started fourth grade – the former Washington Elementary School.

BCSS operates under Great Bend USD 428 but serves an estimated 800 students across four school districts: Otis-Bison, Ellinwood, Hoisington and Great Bend. Riley has worked for 428 for about a decade, first as a special education teacher at Eisenhower Elementary School, and then as the special education coordinator for BCSS for the past five years. On July 1, she will step into a new role as director of the department when longtime director Christie Gerdes leaves.

Education may have been her first choice as a career field, but Riley says she explored other options along the way.

“I loved to play school when I was little,” she said. She was the oldest of seven children and the role of teacher came to her naturally. After earning an associate degree at Barton Community College, she headed to Fort Hays State University.

“I started out in education, but then, you always hear that rhetoric that teachers don’t make a lot of money.” She enrolled in some business classes but decided that wasn’t what she wanted to do. Next, she decided she would become a nurse, finished the prerequisite courses and even got accepted into nursing school.

But then, she listened to her heart and realized she only wanted to be a teacher, no matter what others advised. So she finished her bachelor’s degree in elementary education and later earned a master’s degree in special education and an educational specialist degree in educational administration, all from FHSU.

“I couldn’t dream of doing anything else.”

Coming full circle

Riley was born in Great Bend and started kindergarten at Park Elementary School. “My dad and I actually had the same kindergarten teacher, Mrs. (Lorrayne) Eveleigh. For grades 1-3 she attended Eisenhower Elementary School and she remembers her fourth-grade teacher, Linda Gotsche, was at Washington Elementary School, which is now the Washington Early Education Center and the BCSS office.

Years after leaving Great Bend, when Riley became a special education teacher at Eisenhower, “it was really cool because I got to work with teachers that had taught me – Linda Gotsche and Vicki McCulley.”

A few blocks from Washington School at 10th and Washington St., Riley’s grandmother worked as a school crossing guard. That is another of her fond childhood memories.

“I would go to work with her and I’d walk back to her in the afternoons,” she recalled. “A lot of my childhood was spent here in Great Bend and so it has a lot of special meaning to me.” Another memory is of the children going to her grandparents’ house after school. “My grandpa would always ask us, ‘Do you want to go cruise Main Street?’ He was an older gentleman, so he would go slower, but he’d always take us to Dairy Queen. Like I said, Great Bend has always felt like home and that’s why I came back here.”

She also met her future husband Doug Riley when they were elementary students in Great Bend. “My family lived next to his family. He was a few years older than me but we actually went to school together here in Washington Elementary and then his family ended up in La Crosse. And then my family ended up there. Years later, he and I ended up married.”

Riley’s mom moved to La Crosse to become a CNA at the hospital there. So after Great Bend, Riley attended schools in Otis-Bison, then old McCracken Middle School and La Crosse High School. She had her first child when she was 17, so instead of graduating from high school she earned a GED. 

Family life and hobbies

Doug Riley is the maintenance manager at KBK Industries in Rush Center. They live in La Crosse and have four children. Their oldest, Jacob, is 21. He graduated from North Central Kansas Technical College in Beloit with his heavy equipment operator credentials and now works for Sporer Land Development out of Oakley. Daughter Calli is a paraprofessional at Otis-Bison schools. She is attending Barton Community College and will probably transfer to FHSU to finish a teaching degree. Son Dustin is finishing his police science certificate at Colby Community College while working for Northwest Department of Corrections in Hays. He expects to begin working at the Barton County Detention Center in a few weeks. Their youngest, Evan, finished his high school credits online in December and is talking to recruiters about joining one of the branches of the military.

“Family is an important factor in my life,” she said. Her mother now lives in Larned and Doug’s family still lives in La Crosse, “so we spend a lot of time doing things with family. My husband and I love to travel. Some of our favorite places to go – because it’s cheap and we can fly out of Wichita – are Destin, Florida or Sedona, Arizona. We like to drive to Colorado because we really enjoy the mountains.”

She also enjoys reading in her spare time.

Always a teacher

Riley started her teaching career at Eisenhower Elementary in Great Bend but left after three years to teach in Hays. “Great Bend was all I knew, and so I just wanted to explore a little bit,” she said. “Hays was also a little bit closer to La Crosse. But by January, (USD 428 administrator) Trish Reiser convinced me to come back – and I was ready to come back. Great Bend just felt more like home.”

She returned to again teach special education at Eisenhower Elementary and later at Great Bend Middle School before becoming the BCSS special education coordinator. Nowadays, instead of teaching children, she is working with adults. Her responsibilities include guiding new teachers. “Not only do our new staff need assistance and guidance, but we need to be able to provide that to our seasoned staff as well,” she said.

She is also an adjunct instructor at FHSU, where she teaches a special ed law class for the master’s program, and she is the special education coordinator for an online school.

Riley is an advocate for education and encourages others to consider teaching as a profession. There are many options, she noted, such as coaching and counseling.

“If I had to give credit to any one thing, it would definitely be my good school experiences. That always kept me going and wanting to do more, and wanting to give back as well.” Looking back on the days when people encouraged her to choose another path, she says, “I want to change the rhetoric out there of, ‘oh, you don’t want to be a teacher.’ Our kids should want to grow up to be teachers because it’s a very rewarding profession. I’m not saying that it’s an easy profession, but it is rewarding and you really have a sense of fulfillment.”

Community Connections is a regular feature of the Great Bend Tribune, showcasing people who live in the Golden Belt. We welcome readers to submit names of individuals who are active in the community that they would like to see featured in a future story. Send suggestions to news@gbtribune.com and explain their “community connections.”