School has always been a family business for ELA teacher Kate Grimm as both her parents are teachers. 

“I always grew up around schools, and I loved getting to see the relationships they had with their students,” Grimm said.

Grimm said that her favorite parts of being a teacher involve helping students figure out what they are going to do after high school and helping them to try to be successful.

 The transition to working with her father was not a jarring experience for Grimm, as her father taught at the high school that she was attending. She said that the experience was invaluable in making the new challenge of working with her father easier.

Her father, business teacher Mike Hilbert, also believes that having already been in the same high school once has helped create a more fluid transition to working together. 

“Ms. Grimm went to Lee’s Summit North when I was there, so it’s kind of like our second time working together,” Hilbert said.

Hilbert is more experienced than his daughter, having spent thirty years teaching, but he says that he was not always sure he wanted to be a teacher. Originally, he was interested in both accounting and teaching, but after a short period of time, he chose to pursue the latter. 

“I think that the relationships I had particularly with my teachers and coaches really influenced my decision,” Hilbert said.

The two teachers communicate on a daily basis, driving together and having the same planning period.

“It is a very unique experience as an adult in your job setting to be able to work with your adult child. It is just a really awesome situation,” Hilbert said. 

As two teachers who are both relatively new to the school, they both feel that the amount of daily contact is good. Grimm also said that she is glad that they have close classrooms as that makes communication easier. 

Something that both Grimm and Hilbert agreed on was that North was a place that stood out to them as somewhere that was a good place to work. Hilbert feels that one of the most attractive qualities was the experience of the teachers in the business department, while Grimm admitted that she would have looked for other places if her father was not already at North.

“It’s just a unique and special place,” Hilbert said. “The students at Blue Valley North are different from any that I’ve taught in the past. They value education and they show up and work hard.”