Honk if you love middle school

Kris VanDuyne ’96 has a soft spot for students making the roller-coaster transition from childhood.

Eight o’clock classes were not early enough for Kris VanDuyne ’96. She signed up for 7 a.m. “It was awesome because I worked out with my boss that I would be a few minutes late,” she says. In her early 20s, Kris was a full-time bookkeeper for Elderlee, a Geneva company that makes and installs highway products like signs and guardrails.

An accounting major, she wanted to get a class in before work. She enjoyed a camaraderie with third-shift workers and others trying to balance adult lives with school.

“One of our classmates had a brand new baby and she was bringing the baby. I love how FLCC was so incredibly accommodating.”

Now, in her first year as principal at Canandaigua Middle School, she still draws on her FLCC experience. On a practical level, her accounting background makes school budgeting easier. Kris also identifies with students whose lives aren’t going the way they had hoped.

A new way forward

FLCC was not Kris’ original plan for college. After graduating Waterloo High School in 1991, she had a basketball scholarship to Hilbert College in Hamburg, south of Buffalo.

She injured her knee her freshman year and lost the scholarship.

Back home Kris got a job and started attending FLCC. She chose accounting because her mother was a bookkeeper, but teaching was always in the back of her mind.

The cover of the spring 2025 Laker magazine She got married and gave birth to her daughter, Katie. “When I became a mom I thought, ‘Is this what I want to do?’”

Kris enrolled at SUNY Brockport as a history major. Then, she earned a master’s in international studies and her teaching certificate at St. John Fisher University. It wasn’t easy with a toddler and soon, a son, Kyle.

Kris reverted to a practice that worked when she was at Elderlee and taking a mix of early morning and evening classes at FLCC: Think of the day as a series of segments and accomplish as much as you can in each. “I would not be here if it wasn’t for FLCC,” she adds, “because I went through that challenging process of getting that associate degree and knew that I could continue to do more challenging work.”

This article is a feature in the spring 2025 Laker magazine. You can read the full magazine online.

Trust the process

Kris’ first teaching job was eighth-grade social studies at Canandaigua Middle School in 2004. From there she moved to Canandaigua Academy, where she served for a time as lead teacher of the social studies department. Later, as dean of students at the academy, she oversaw summer school and shared her Hilbert College disappointment with the August graduates.

“I told them in my little speech that they had already worked through adversity. They saw everyone else around them graduating in June,” Kris says. She encouraged them to think of it this way: “It didn’t go the way I had originally planned, but look how it all turned out.”

“I think it’s a struggle in our society,” she continues, “that when you’re graduating high school at age 17 or 18 that you’re supposed to have your whole life mapped out. I didn’t have it mapped out. I didn’t know I was going to have that knee injury that changed my path.”

Another message Kris shares: Trust the process. It’s a reference to courses from her accounting degree she thought she would never use. This includes statistics, which she encountered again in her master’s program and the doctorate in educational administration she is working on at Buffalo State University. Years after her elective in community policing at FLCC, she is collaborating with a school resource officer.

Kris VanDuyne poses with a group of Canandaigua Middle School students. Photo by Rikki Van Camp

Embracing the angst

Today, Kris is back where she started two decades ago, working with an age group where life often doesn’t go as planned.

“I do like the challenge of this building,” she says. “At the primary and elementary schools, everyone thinks their life is the same as everyone else’s. At the academy, they realize it’s not, and they have found their niches. It all piles in at the middle school. The friends you had in sixth grade are not the friends you have in eighth grade and how do you reconcile that? Everything that happens at the middle school is absolutely fascinating to me because of that.”

Kris and her colleagues use restorative practices to settle the inevitable conflicts. She wants kids to learn how to handle their emerging differences and to understand that they don’t have to be friends to be friendly.

“We don’t want this next group to have the feeling of stress we adults have now when we’re afraid to bring up topics,” she says.

Kris builds credibility with her middle schoolers by getting in their space. She “takes over” a homeroom every Wednesday and meets the buses pulling off Granger Street at 7:15 a.m. She has informal conversations while rolling a raised desk cart down the halls. Students like to honk the bicycle horn she attached to one side.

Without realizing it, they may even absorb that their principal is comfortable in her own skin and where her life had led. “It all worked out,” she says. “I look at it now and I think, it’s all good. Good stories.”

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