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E.J. Rotherham was known for his loud, goofy personality, but also for his compassion and his ability to listen.
E.J. Rotherham’s blond wig shook as he belted out the lyrics to the Friday song on Agnes Stewart Middle School’s May 23, 2025, morning video announcements.
“Monday is a bummer, Tuesday is a drag, Wednesday’s getting better, Thursday’s not so bad, but Fridayyy, Fridayyyy, Friday is my favorite day,” he sang, his exaggerated enthusiasm making the two middle school co-anchors crack a smile as they sang along.
It was Friday, and Rotherham and his two middle school co-anchors didn’t know they were performing Rotherham’s last video announcement at the school. Rotherham died unexpectedly May 25 from a heart attack. He was 60.
In his 26 years at the school, as a teacher and assistant principal, Rotherham was known equally for his loud, goofy spirit – he made frequent use of hats, wigs and costumes — and his ability to listen and understand. His compassion and his commitment to students defined his life.
A Nebraska boy
Rotherham was born into a large Catholic family in Ewing, Nebraska. He was one of nine children.
When he was a young student, he was shamed by a teacher when he read out loud, said his wife, Shanna Rotherham. Because of this, he never forced children to read aloud when he became a teacher.
“Some of the greatest teachers have that lived experience, I think,” she said.
He started his career in Bellevue, Nebraska, teaching elementary school, and moved to Oregon after meeting his wife.
Rotherham was proud of where he was from: His 1999 Dodge truck was nicknamed “Big Red” and had multiple Nebraska Cornhusker stickers on it. He would drive it around Agnes Stewart after hours, looking for students who were hanging around without supervision.
Jeff Fuller, former principal at Agnes Stewart, remembered Rotherham regularly pulling out old sayings from his Midwest upbringing.
“Winner winner chicken dinner!” Rotherham would say whenever they had a drawing for positive behavior, sometimes wearing a chicken hat to boot.
A mentor to all
A big part of an assistant principal’s job is discipline. But Rotherham did discipline differently.
Parents, teachers and students would enter Rotherham’s office frustrated, angry and tearful. Within 10 minutes, Fuller said he would witness their tears transform into laughter, and they would leave Rotherham’s office with a hug.
“He just had this way about him, of being able to just listen and make people feel heard,” Fuller said.
Rotherham was committed to getting to the bottom of whatever was causing a child to misbehave or need extra attention. Even if certain students were in the principal’s office every day, or sometimes multiple times a day, Rotherham didn’t give up on them, Fuller said, and he made sure teachers didn’t, either.
“He could see past a behavior to the human being that was there,” said Whitney McKinley, middle school coordinator for Springfield Public Schools and a coworker of Rotherham.
He was also a protector. The day Chantel Miller got a call from Rotherham telling her that her son, Hayden, had been bullied at school, she was beside herself.
“I was going to rip my son out of school and take him to a different school,” Miller said.
But Rotherham had already come up with a plan to keep Hayden safe.
He convinced Miller to keep him at Agnes Stewart with his idea of a discreet daily check-in system: Every morning, Hayden would give Rotherham a thumbs-up or thumbs-down as he passed him in the hallway. If it was a thumbs-up day, Rotherham would know that Hayden was feeling confident and happy, and if it was a thumbs-down day, Rotherham would tactfully pull Hayden aside sometime to talk.
On one thumbs-down day, Hayden told Rotherham how his bike was stolen off his family’s front porch. Less than a week later, during morning drop-off, Miller saw Rotherham running out of the building pushing a new bike.
“Hey, hey, hey!” Rotherham said. “You don’t need to pick him up today, because look what he’s riding home.”
An open heart
Fuller and Rotherham worked together for 13 years as principal and vice principal at Agnes Stewart, including the years when the brick-and-mortar school was closed for COVID-19.
While Rotherham wasn’t very tech-savvy, he had the links to every Zoom classroom and would spend the day disrupting classes and sharing a joke of the day, Fuller said. Students loved it. They quickly came to recognize Rotherham, even though they had never met him in person.
COVID-19 was also a time of economic struggle for many of Agnes Stewart’s students. Rotherham was acutely aware of this.
Fuller’s eyes welled at the memory of doing home visits with Rotherham, delivering items to students who didn’t have resources at home.
“Sometimes that was school supplies, sometimes that was clothes, sometimes it was shoes, sometimes it was the sweatshirt that he was wearing that he would leave with them,” Fuller said.
Shanna Rotherham said her husband’s job required him to regularly look at data points like grades, test scores and attendance, but the relationships with students and families was what made him tick.
“For him, it wasn’t a crunching numbers thing, it was cultivating hearts, building relationships, and you can’t crunch hearts,” she said.
After Rotherham’s death, Chantel Miller’s son Hayden didn’t want to go to school for a couple of days.
He worried that without Rotherham at Agnes Stewart, the bullies would be back. There were no bullies to worry about when Hayden returned to school, but without Rotherham, the middle school feels different.
Next year, Rotherham will be absent from morning announcements, and his office will have a new assistant principal. But a void will remain at Agnes Stewart.
“It’s not that you can’t replace the principal,” Miller said. “It’s that you can’t replace the heart that our principal had.”
