Thirty years ago in a small Ohio town, Jason Radel graduated from high school feeling a sense of finality that very few 18-year-olds really experience.

“When I graduated, I stepped off the stage and said, ‘I'll never step foot in a school again,” Radel said he thought at the time. “Now I step in one every single day in my life.”

Radel knew from an early age that he wanted to serve his country in the armed forces. But it was that same call to service that would one day return him to the classroom.

Radel, who is currently in his first year as the athletic director at Gardner Edgerton High School,  said he never saw himself going to college because he never really liked school while growing up. He was never bad at it, but classroom learning never really interested him.

“I was involved in sports and stuff, but school wasn’t my thing,” Radel said. “I had no intention of going to college.”

Radel felt so strongly about it that he said he nearly turned down the GI Bill when he joined the Air Force. Military members have to pay into it to get the benefits, one of which is paying for college tuition, which Radel felt like he would never need.

“I intended to be a lifer when I joined,” Radel said. “I had no intention of getting out after four years. I planned on doing my 20 and retiring.”

Radel started with basic training in San Antonio, Texas, followed by technical training in Biloxi, Mississippi, to become a radio operator. He ended up stationed at Andrews Air Force Base, outside Morningside, Maryland, from 1993 to 1997. Andrews is also near Washington, D.C. and is the home of Air Force One.

Radel said it took him time to adjust to these new surroundings, especially with his base consistently hosting the President of the United States and countless other political leaders, both foreign and domestic.

“I'm an 18-year-old kid from a small town in Ohio, and now I'm in one of the biggest, most craziest places in the nation,” he said.

With the President constantly coming through his base, Radel also got introduced to a possible career outside of the military. 

“When our security police would deploy somewhere, they would bring in augmentees to help work with other security police that were still there, just to help out,” Radel said. “That's where I kind of got a taste for law enforcement and had the idea of going into law enforcement coming out of the military.”

Radel’s experiences started to include guarding the plane for the Emperor of Japan and the King of Jordan.

“I also did a security detail for the First Lady, who was Hillary Clinton at the time,” he said. 

He never got to actually meet her, or President Bill Clinton for that matter, but he served within 40-50 feet of them on many occasions.

Radel had hoped that those experiences would help him land a job with the Capitol Police. 

“It was not easy to get on to places in law enforcement around the D.C. area because a lot of military people were not leaving the area," he said.

So when Radel finished his four-year tour, he ended up moving back home with his parents in Ohio. Not too long after, his parents ended up moving to Kansas. Radel did not want to stay in Ohio by himself, so he ended up “drifting” out to Kansas with his family.
 

Radel had trouble turning his experience as a radio operator into a job outside the military and law enforcement. But he would ultimately catch on as a temp employee at a corporation in Overland Park. 

Radel worked for a company that processed credit card transactions, mostly for aviation and trucking companies. He started working his way up in the company. Radel even got to work alongside the woman who would become his wife. She was a computer programmer who wrote code for the same credit card reader machines that he was selling.

But Radel never really found the job to be fulfilling at any point during his seven years working in the corporate world.

Then one day, while on a business trip to England, his life was changed by a conversation with a Shell aviation executive during a taxi cab ride.

“I remember this like it happened yesterday,” Radel said. “He looked at me and he said, ‘Do you ever just want to do something for other people and not just sit here and make money for these corporations?’”

Radel’s response?

“Yes,” he recalled thinking at the time.

“My thought process was that I’ve always wanted to help kids that were like me,” he said. “(Ones) who didn’t love school and try to help them enjoy their time in school more, to help them be successful.”

It was shortly after that conversation that Radel decided to pursue a career in education. Not too long after, he became a paraeducator at a middle school in the Gardner Edgerton school district and started to take college courses to become a special education teacher.

During this time, Radel had an experience that helped him know he made the right decision to jump into education, just a decade after practically swearing off education altogether.

“There was a student that I worked with when I was a para, who I was actually warned if you walk by this student, they’re going to yell at you and say, ‘Why are you here?’ and ‘Don’t come near me.’” he said.

Radel learned that this student felt like teachers walking over to him, likely trying to help the student with the work, were bringing extra attention to him as a special education student.

The warning to Radel proved correct.

“It happened,” Radel said. “I just walked over to the table and started asking a question. This student's sitting there with like five other kids and he goes off about me coming over to him. I was not even actually standing next to him, I was on the other side of the table standing next to another student.”

But Radel did not let that introduction stop him from working with the student and building a positive connection over time.

“I built the type of relationship with the student that the principals would call me and say, ‘Hey, you need to go get your kid out of this room, they need your help,’” he said.

With Radel’s support, this student would eventually become an honor roll student at the middle school. When the student went on to high school, he ended up coming back to make a request of Radel.

“He came and found me and was like, ‘Hey, I'm gonna wrestle. Will you come watch me? I want you to be there,'” he said. “Just building that relationship and understanding the impact that I was making on his life. He was one of those kids that school was not his thing. He was not going to do school, and I was able to help him be successful and move on to the next part of his life.”

Radel said that now he has a four-inch binder that is filled with letters and thank-you notes detailing similar responses from other students who he’s worked with over the last 17 years.

 “If I'm having a rough day or whatever, I go back to that and I read those,” he said.

Another thing that Radel has enjoyed about working in education has been his chance to coach sports.
 

While he was still a para, Radel was asked by one of the middle school coaches if he had any interest in coaching. Radel, who loved playing sports even when he did not like much else about school, jumped at the chance.

Radel worked as a coach at the middle school for eight years while also serving in his paraeducator role. During that time, he completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, with the latter being in special education.

At that point, Radel made the transition to becoming a special education teacher at Gardner Edgerton High School.

Marvin Diener, Gardner Edgerton football coach at the time, asked Radel to join his coaching staff. Radel stayed on when Ryan Cornelsen took over in 2018, and again when Jesse Owen took over in 2021.

But shortly after that last transition, Radel took a year off from coaching football. He had just finished getting his administration license through Emporia State.

“I was looking at doing more curriculum and things like that with the school, started thinking about transitioning out of coaching at the time,” he said.

He stuck with softball for one more spring, but was still focused on making the jump to working more hands-on with school administration.

Then Radel found out that the Gardner Edgerton athletic director at the time was planning to move on. Radel felt like it was perfect timing.

"I've spent my entire career in the Gardner Edgerton School district," Radel said. "So I started as a para here 17 years later now I'm an athletic director for the high school."

Still in the middle of the transition, Radel said this first year has been eye-opening for him.

“To be an assistant principal and a new athletic director at a 6A program, I'm not sure how many times that happens across the state,” he said. “I think a lot of people transition to probably a little bit smaller schools before they move to a 6A school.

“But it has been great.”

Radel said he’s received a lot of support from other athletic directors from around the Sunflower League and beyond.

“I have some friends that I coached with who are first year athletic directors at different schools this year,” he said. “My principal and all of our district administrative staff have been super supportive and have been great.”

Radel credits his military experience for the way he teachers, coaches and now adminstrates.

"I alwyas go back on my military experience," he said. "The organizational parts, the attention to detail, the discpline, how to work with others, just the teamwork."

Radel said his transition has been good, but he’s always finding out new things that he did not realize needed to be done, or more specifically, done by him. He’ll have another one of those new tasks this Friday, which will see many of Radel’s various interests in life intersect. Radel has been put in charge of organizing the school’s yearly Veterans Day assembly.

“I'm very nervous about it because of how important it is,” he said. “It probably makes me more nervous than having to host a Friday night sectional game later that evening.”

Even with the juggling act, Radel finds it hard to complain.

“Being a person that has a service heart, I want to serve others,” he said. “My leadership style is completely a servant leader. That was the point of joining the military and that was the point of getting into education, is to be able to serve others.

“Now it’s even more important to me in my role now as an assistant principal and an athletic director.”

NOTE: This is the fourth of four features by KSHSAA Covered writers highlighting military veterans who have and still are giving back to their local school districts.