CSC grad wins Indiana teaching award

The latest recipient is Jane Tangeman Newblom, a business teacher at Sheridan High School, located on the outskirts of Indianapolis. She is a 1975 graduate of Chadron High School and a 1978 graduate of Chadron State. Her parents, Larry and Corinne Tangeman, live at O’Neill.

Her father was an administrator at Chadron State for 15 years, including 20 months as president in the mid-1970s. He later was president of Peru State College for 4 ½ years.

The award winner’s husband, Bob Newblom, also grew up in Chadron and graduated from Chadron High in 1975. After attending Chadron State two years, he graduated from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. He is the district manager of 10 Olive Garden Restaurants in the Midwest.

Newblom has not had a long tenure in teaching. She taught business at Minatare High School for a year after graduating from Chadron State, but worked as an accountant for various medical facilities during most of the 1980s while her husband moved up the Olive Garden corporate ladder. She also was busy raising the couple’s three children during that time.

In the early 1990s, Newblom was a substitute teacher in Omaha area schools. She became a full-time teacher for the first time in more than 20 years in 2000, when she taught social studies and language arts on a temporary contract at Mishawaka, Ind.

She assumed her present position at Sheridan High four years ago. It has an enrollment of about 400.

The Sheridan principal, Ed Baker, said Newblom frequently draws on her background in business while leading her classes.

“When she tells kids what’s going on out there, they better believe her because she’s been there,” said Baker. Another Sheridan teacher, Sharon Brimberry, added, “She has had on-the-job, real-life experiences that make kids trust what she has to say. She brings in great ideas. She’s a real inspiration to me.”

Newblom said while working in business she never received the kind of rewards she that she experiences in teaching, that of making a difference in someone’s life.

“It sounds trite, but I know all students can learn,” she said. “It’s up to me to figure out how they learn best. To me, education has always been the answer to all woes.”

“Look at them,” she said to an Indianapolis Star reporter as her students in a cadet teaching class helped one another with a class project. “They are engaged, eager to learn, they’re applying themselves….How could you not want to do this?”

Newblom, who holds a master’s degree in education from Indiana/Purdue University, received $500 from the Indiana Farm Bureau, a leather attaché case and a framed certificate from the Department of Education.

There are more than 66,000 teachers in Indiana.