“You know that day of, take your kid to work day? That has been every day for the last 19 years,” Amber Jacque says when we meet in her office at Lone Tree School one morning in July. “Because we have five children, it’s been a lot of days that this office has been also home to my children.”

If you have kids in Lone Tree School, chances are good you know Mrs. Jacque. She joined the district in 2007 and served as elementary school principal, added the role of athletic director last year, and now in 2026-27, she will serve as principal of the full building, grades PreK to 12.

It’s a rare opportunity. Of the 325 public school districts in Iowa, perhaps a dozen operate an entire PK-12 system under a single roof.

“I am really excited about it,” Jacque says. “Probably the thing that excites me the most is that I want to be able to learn more about what they’re doing in the middle school, high school. I think we have a lot of awesome things going up there with the CTE [Career and Technical Education], the ag, the business, the FCS [Family and Consumer Sciences], that our kids have a lot of cool opportunities for.”

The district previously operated with two principals, but declining enrollment has necessitated difficult financial decisions. That’s caused some to wonder if full-building principal is too much on a single plate, but Jacque believes it will be manageable.

“I think if it were a brand-new person coming into our building who hasn’t been here, I do that think that would be a big change,” she says. “But I already know all of the kids, I already know all of the families,” which gives her a distinct advantage.

Which isn’t to say there won’t be more to learn.

“It’s taking on teacher evaluations, data team meetings, and looking at assessment data. The biggest piece that I will be learning is the scheduling and the post-secondary education stuff, that would be the thing I probably know least about,” she acknowledges. But she embraces that. “I’m excited for it. I don’t feel nervous. My husband and I are going to be empty nesters, and I already work a lot.”

Jacque will begin her 20th year with the Lone Tree district this year, but her career didn’t start here. Originally from northeast Iowa, her first teaching job was in Greene, a small town west of Nashua. She moved on to Burlington and Davenport, teaching both general and special ed students in elementary and middle school grades.

This experience set her up to appreciate Lone Tree, where not only could she have her kids close, but she found a great community.

“The kids here are really amazing, and they’re kind. They really want to work hard and please people. As well as the parents, the parents are very supportive,” she says. At Lone Tree she’s found “a mix of feeling like it’s a good place for my family and feeling supported.”

Creating that kind of positive culture in the elementary school has been a priority for Jacque, and it will remain so going forward.

“One of the biggest things I want our teachers to do is, in the morning when they wake up, not feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, I gotta go to work,’ but be like, ‘Yay, ok, I’m going to work today,’” she says. “I think that’s one of the things for me, too. I don’t dread coming to work, and that’s such a good feeling. You come, you enjoy what you do, you enjoy the people around you, and a lot of days it doesn’t feel like a job.”

What exactly does a school principal do?

“For me, it’s really important that I’m visible,” Jacque says, and that means starting her day early and getting essential things done before anyone else arrives. When teachers start trickling in, and she loops around the hallways and cafeteria greeting them, letting them know she’s available if needed. By 8 a.m. she’s in the lobby greeting students, and after announcements, she heads back to the office to handle email.

“I’m kind of bad because I actually check my email almost all night, even when I’m home, and so I’m kind of on top of it,” she admits.

She meets with the instructional coach and visits classrooms until lunch time, which she spends in the cafeteria. Her afternoons are filled with more email, administrative meetings, data team meetings, and planning meetings with teachers. She also handles the athletic director tasks.

“We have a very smooth-running machine down here,” Jacque says. “They’re great, dependable teachers. They come to work and do their job, and very few of them need support. I think that in the end our test scores have really shown what they’ve been doing in the classrooms, and that really is them sticking to their job and wanting their kids to do well.”

Some of that smoothness is likely due to Jacque, who finds things go well if expectations are made clear – another of her strong leadership qualities.

“I’m a very organized person and so I like to create a lot of documents that have specific procedures and things in them, just so there aren’t any questions,” she says. “I think if people know exactly what they’re supposed to do and what’s expected, they do it. It’s when they don’t know that things get derailed.”

When Jacque looks forward to involvement with middle and high school grades, she sees opportunities through the lens of both a principal and parent. Data has been an asset to the elementary grades, and she looks forward to using that tool at the upper levels. And having had five kids, all with different strengths and ambitions, graduate from the school, she has thoughts on where the gaps might be.

“I feel like maybe some more opportunities with job shadowing and post-secondary experiences for some of the kids would have been beneficial,” she says. “For me, it’s really important that our kids get as many of those experiences as possible, so that’s one of my really big interests as well.”

In the end, “My heart is always with what’s best for our kids,” she says, and she hopes that the community will continue to support the school and the staff as they continue a tradition of educating students in town, as Lone Tree has for the past 154 years.