Young Sullivan Zerby could barely contain his excitement.
The 15-year-old Huntley High School freshman was in kindergarten then, his mother remembers, and had come home with news about something amazing that happened in his P.E. class that day.
“Sully says, ‘Mom, we did a dance to the movie “Cars” today!’ and I went, ‘You did what?’ And he goes, ‘It’s the song you made up! I saw you doing it!’ I’m like ‘You learned my dance?’ It was like my favorite moment – like my heart exploded.”
Not every mom is also a P.E. teacher, of course, and not every P.E. teacher is a presenter at professional development conferences and workshops.
Kelly Zerby fits both descriptions.
“I’m the Dancing Queen of Illinois, as they call me,” says Zerby, who earned her NIU B.S.Ed. in Physical Education in 1999. “I make up elementary-type dances; they’re really easy. There’s no craziness. I’ve just always made up really dorky dances that people have loved and the kids have always loved.”
Her reason for creating dances for P.E. is simple – and genius.
Many of the children at DeKalb’s Littlejohn, Founders and Jefferson elementary schools are students from multicultural homes where English is not the first language.
“When you’re trying to teach a kid what a sternocleidomastoid is, and they’re like, ‘What?’ ” she says. “Just showing them on a body didn’t work, so I started making songs to remember things, and then they knew the bones and muscles a little better.”
And, she has learned, you just never know who’s watching you dance.
“One year at IAHPERD (the Illinois Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance), I did a dance – and I didn’t know my son’s teacher from Huntley was in the room,” she says. “I would’ve looked for her, but there were like 400 people in the room. There’s no way I would have known or seen her.”
Zerby’s audiences have only grown larger in the years since, taking her impact far beyond her home state.
“Being at IAHPERD led me to be the presenter I am now, and now I nationally present all over the places with my friends, and give my content to people,” she says. “People in California are singing my songs and doing my dances. People in Virginia are doing it. It’s just kind of branched out, and it’s super cool to see how people ‘share in the care.’ ”
UPON HER 1994 GRADUATION from Oak Lawn High School, Zerby she wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.
Born in Chicago and raised near Midway Airport until moving to the southwest suburb as she entered sixth-grade, Zerby is the first in her family to attend college. NIU offered a comfortable distance from home.
She knew that she wanted to work with children. She had attended science camps as a girl, so teaching seemed like a good idea. She also was a three-sport athlete in high school – basketball, cross country and track – so physical education appealed to her as well.
P.E. ultimately won her heart, obviously, and that decision has proven an excellent one.
- Zerby is now in her 23rd year of teaching in DeKalb Community Unit School District 428, where she also serves as P.E. coordinator.
- IAHPERD’s Elementary Teacher of the Year for 2021 is now president-elect of that statewide organization. “I have a voice in the room,” she says.
- Zerby is also Shape America Midwest’s 2022 Elementary Teacher of the Year and remains in the running for the national award, presented in New Orleans in April.
- She’s also a lifelong learner: Zerby also holds an NIU M.S.Ed. in Educational Administration an NIU M.S.Ed. in Literacy Education with an ESL endorsement and, earned during COVID-19, an NIU graduate certificate in adapted P.E.
Her passion for P.E. and sport – and her love of playing and staying in motion – is unwavering.
“I really like the togetherness of teams; I think that kind of guides you into being a socially appropriate person, if you will. I know how to talk to people. I know how to work with people. I know how to collaborate with people,” she says.
“Every once in a while, I come across somebody in my life who never did anything with anybody in any club or sport, and I’m like, ‘I can tell you never had to fight over the ball or figure out the play that worked best to succeed together,’ ” she adds. “Some parts of sport are solo – you have to work for yourself – but some parts are collaborative. You have to work together, and I think that’s helped me a lot.”
Zerby appreciates her NIU preparation as well.
She enjoyed its balance of “all of the different areas of sport and going deep into the science,” along with the curriculum of how to teach motor development to young children. She enjoyed every opportunity to practice in clinical settings and learn “on the job.”
And when she graduated, she earned the enthusiastic recommendation of her NIU professors to DeKalb when the district telephoned in search of new teachers to enable its shift to daily P.E.
That philosophy – that five-days-a-week schedule – resonated with her.
“I did not have a really good P.E. background in elementary school. I went to a Catholic elementary school first. I think we had P.E. like once a week; maybe twice a month. I don’t remember a lot of it. In sixth-grade in Oak Lawn, we had P.E. more often, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah,’ ” Zerby says. “There are still very few districts that have daily P.E. in Illinois. It’s very rare. It’s very sparse.”
DeKalb allows her to “keep thinking outside the box” and surrounds her “the best” teachers who “are in it for the love of working with children.”
After logging 13 years at Littlejohn and seven at Founders, she made the move to Jefferson in 2019.
“Jefferson was a smaller school, and I never taught at a small school or by myself, and I was like, ‘Let’s give that a shot.’ So I took a brave chance at Year 19 and left where I was comfortable at Founders, with many friends, and I’m glad I did because it’s a different place,” she says. “It’s a unique experience. It’s like my program. I see every kid in the school every day. I love it.”
ZERBY’S ADVOCACY COMES naturally.
“I think that after a few years, when you just kind of feel like you know what you’re doing, that it’s really good to give back to your profession in some sort of way,” she says. “I started small.”
Her first stop was IAHPERD’s Northern District, meeting colleagues from a 13-county region and attending workshops.
When she inquired about becoming more involved, she was asked to become district president – an office now has held three different times.
She also has served the state-level organization as vice president for children, a position she held five years before the invitation to serve as president-elect. (NIU’s Jim Ressler is currently vice president for adults.)
Zerby remembers first glimpsing the enormity of the annual convention in St. Charles – the gathering has moved since to Tinley Park – and learning not only about her field but about the background operation that helps to lead P.E. programming throughout the state.
Becoming president-elect is just as eye-opening, she says.
“It’s a big networking opportunity, and especially in the last couple years, it’s been really critical for people to have that connection,” Zerby says. “It just blows your mind how many people are doing really amazing things in physical education. Then you learn about the politics of things, because we have lobbyists in the room who are fighting for us – to not get rid of P.E.”
State and national acclaim go hand in hand with her service to the profession; she has applied for awards to create recognition not of herself but of P.E.
“I just want P.E. to be a valid thing. It’s not like it used to be when we were in school. There’s a lot more rigor to it. There’s a lot more thinking involved. The state standards and the national standards are way harder than they ever were when we were kids. I want people to understand that it’s a relevant subject,” she says.
“That’s why I want to have a presence. I want P.E. daily in DeKalb forever, so if I’m doing my job as P.E. coordinator, and I’m bringing back things from IAHPERD and sharing them with all my P.E. teachers, and planning professional development, I feel like it’s helping the whole community,” she adds.
“The award kind of helped me, in a sense, that, ‘OK. I am doing good things. I am a presence. I’m trying to bring really creative things to the town and the community, and it just made me feel proud to finally win. I have worked hard, and I’ve done a lot of things in 23 years, and I feel proud and privileged to still be teaching physical education and still inspiring others.”
INSPIRING AND RECRUITING new P.E. teachers is important to Zerby, whose husband, Zak, is an English teacher at Conant High School in Hoffman Estates, and whose daughter, Mallory, is a 13-year-old seventh-grader at Marlowe Middle School in Huntley.
“My message to other teachers who are struck, or to younger teachers who are coming in, is to keep teaching,” she says, “because we’re going to have a shortage of teachers and we just don’t want to make it less and less.”
Zerby clearly follows her own advice, reveling in each day she spends with students.
“You get to move all day, which I think helps keep you young – even though my body seems to keep failing and I have a new hip,” she says. “But I’m not the kind of person who can just sit there and do the same thing in the same spot every day. I can’t. I can’t do that.”
What makes her a good teacher?
Being human, she says.
“I have energy and I’m silly. I have that level of rapport and respect with the kids that I need to have. I have a love and respect,” she says. “I talk to them, and I think it’s really important to build relationships with students, even though I see over 300 kids every day. I know all of their names. I know who’s a White Sox fan, who’s a Cubs fans and, if I can get past that, I know brothers and sisters.”
Conversations with children about life allows her to explain that she’s “not a robot.”
“I tell them stories about when I was in fifth-grade, or I show my picture of me when I was in fifth-grade, and they’re like, ‘Holy cow! That was you?’ ” Zerby says.
“You just have these moments of being human with them, and then they look at you a bit differently. They just kind of understand that I’ve been through this. I was 10 once and I was in fifth-grade – and let me see what I remember about fifth-grade,” she adds.
“And then we just kind of chat, and I think that makes a big difference for them when they are acting out. I’m like, ‘Dude.’ And that’s all I have to say. Or I just look at them, and they’re like, ‘Sorry.’ I’ve always said, ‘I’ll give respect to you if you give it to me. Like it or not, we’ve got to figure it out. We’re going to see each other every day, maybe for six years in a row, so we’ve got to find that relationship.’ ”
Professionally, Zerby is committed to flexibility and cooperation.
She maintains a positive outlook on her chosen career that she shares with colleagues near and far.
“I tell my student-teachers and clinical students that every class and every day is different. There are no two, 30-minute classes that are the same. There are no days that are the same, even if you’re teaching the same thing,” she adds.
“I did this ‘heart adventure’ course three days in a row, which is the same order, but it’s never the same because the kids act differently. You’ve got different people in the gym. You might have the principal coming in.”
Readiness for whatever and willingness to contribute to the greater good are key: “ ‘They need the gym for this? OK, we’re going outside!’ You’ve got to be ready for change, and I like to think I do that, and I think that’s why I thrive,” she says.
Meanwhile, she says, “I don’t want to be that teacher who sets up their plan for the year, and that’s it for the next five years. I’ve never done that. I can only plan like three weeks ahead before I’m like, ‘You know what? I just saw something on Twitter. I want to try this now,’ ” she says.
“The great thing about daily P.E. is the flexibility to try new things. I like to be ever-changing, and my students know that as well,” she adds. “It’s a journey for sure.”
