Haddonfield school Superintendent Chuck Klaus got into teaching for the wrong reasons. That’s how he explains it.
Klaus decided to become a teacher in another district in the early ‘90s because he wanted to coach.
“That was really important to me,” he recalled, “so I became a teacher. It didn’t take me long to realize that’s not the way, that teaching was my job, and coaching was the second job.”
Klaus realized within three or four years that his goal would be to improve as an educator.
“… You start working with kids and grinding and teaching, learning how to be a better teacher,” he explained. “And then you realize this is the job, teaching. And once you’ve put that priority in there, it becomes a really powerful thing.”
Yet coaching is what brought Klaus to the borough, where he became head wrestling coach at Haddonfield Memorial High School more than 30 years ago. A year later, he was hired to teach English, but remained a coach.
Through the years, Klaus guided teams not only in wrestling but freshman football, softball, 10 years of girls track and a decade of middle-school cross country. In all, he coached about 60 seasons of sports in Haddonfield alone.
“There was never a year I didn’t coach when I was teaching,” he recounted. “I coached all three seasons, every year I was a teacher.”
Klaus also coached one of his own children, Max. The eldest of three, he spent his school years in the borough district, graduating from Haddonfield Memorial in 2009.
As an educator, Klaus taught English, and while math came easier to him, English classes were always his favorite.
“There was something about math that I was, I could do it, but I didn’t find much joy in doing it,” Klaus explained. “I found far more joy in reading and talking about literature and those types of things. Classroom teaching’s great, because you’re with the kids every single day, you’re sitting next to them, learning with them.
“All that is just really rewarding.”
In his classes, the future superintendent emphasized the importance of hand writing personal notes and letters. He knew his message had resonated when he got a letter from a former student thanking him for his teaching.
“I know he hand wrote it because he cared,” Klaus remembered, noting that the student now has children in Haddonfield schools. “He listened to what I talked about.”
Klaus taught until 2008, and after more than a decade in the classroom, he earned his principal certification. When the district created the assistant principal position at the high school, Klaus took the job, even though it meant an end to teaching and coaching.
“Once you get into administration, you start seeing you can have a bigger impact,” he related.
“Your scope of influence grows. And I enjoyed these systems.”
It would not be his last administrative role. After serving as an assistant principal, Klaus was transferred to Central Elementary School for a year in the top job. He then moved back to the high school and became principal in 2011.
“I loved the high-school principal job, which was a hard job,” he acknowledged. “That’s the one looking back I’d say that’s the one I might have gotten the most out of.”
After seven years, Klaus moved to district administration in the role of interim assistant superintendent to a new chief from Pennsylvania, Lawrence Mussoline Jr.
He became superintendent after Mussoline retired in 2020.
“I took over in the middle of COVID, right in the heat of COVID,” Klaus recalled. “I put together with my team a plan to come back. And we did. We did very well coming back from COVID. We were really successful doing that.”
Besides guiding the reopening of schools and nurturing a sense of normalcy, Klaus’ major projects included reorganizing the way the district administration and individual schools were run. A $47-million bond referendum passed at the end of last year.
But Klaus noticed there were nearly as many central-office administrators as there were at the building level. He eliminated some of the former and hired supervisors to oversee specific content areas, placing them in individual schools. They help coach teachers and improve and update curriculum when changes are needed.
“That has made a significant difference in the last two years,” Klaus pointed out. “You’re not going to find a staff member in this district who won’t tell you that was a significant improvement.
“… When I’m retired, if you asked me these questions about that, that’s maybe the best thing I did.”
The bond referendum has enabled the school system to make improvements to its buildings – some about 80 years old – classrooms, accessibility and infrastructure. And $9 million in state aid will reduce the district budget’s burden on taxpayers to $37.7 million, an annual tax increase of less than $400 for the average assessed home.
Major advancements possible with the referendum include full-day kindergarten, more classroom space and updates to athletic facilities.
“I wanted to get full-day kindergarten,” Klaus related. “So we’re starting extended-day kindergarten now because we don’t have space for everyone, but in three years, we will have full-day kindergarten in place, and that’s going to be a wonderful thing for the town.”
Investments and advancements will also help the borough, according to Klaus said, especially investing in early-childhood education.”
“Everyone will tell you that when you invest in early-childhood education, that pays the biggest dividends, because you catch interventions earlier and all that stuff,” he noted. “It’s a really powerful thing.”
Over the years, Klaus says his most important role in the district has been as a parent whose kids all graduated from Haddonfield Memorial.
“I always tell people I was a teacher, administrator, parent, coach,” he emphasized. “I can answer just about any question you have from whatever lens you want to look at it.”
