The following article is the second of three pieces highlighting the honorees at the Northport Journal’s upcoming Sunset Gala. Joining the Brauns as “glimmers” are Tiffany Asadourian and Nora Nolan.
When it comes to John and Theresa Braun, community members are not shy sharing how they feel about the East Northport husband and wife.
“A true testament to what genuine and authentic character looks like.” “Two of the most compassionate and kind individuals around.” “A staple to this community and to our children.” “A beautiful couple, making a positive difference every day in the lives of the lucky students who cross their paths.”
It’s high praise for the pair, who began working in the same school building over 20 years ago and have developed the best of reputations: John, for his unique teaching style that engages and enlightens his students, and Theresa for her empathy, her kindness, her time-tested commitment to being there for her “kids.”
There’s also a mohawk, kilt and tattoos, but more on that later.
Better together
John and Theresa started their careers at East Northport Middle School (ENMS) in 2001, but didn’t become friends until five or so years later. In the beginning, the two operated in different worlds: John a seventh grade science teacher, and Theresa a counselor for grades six through eight. Plus, John said, “I was too shy to talk to her.”
Fast forward a few more years and their middle school students, aware of the couple’s blossoming relationship status, began requesting a public marriage ceremony in the school courtyard or auditorium.
The couple married in 2011. One might think that living and working together could strain a relationship, but the opposite is true with the Brauns. Theresa said John calms her down, grounds her, keeps her sane. John felt Theresa’s absence at school recently, when Theresa had to take some time off following foot surgery. “It’s weird being at work without her,” he said. “I like being with her. She complements me. She’s just my favorite person.”
And the Brauns seem to be in their favorite place. The kids that surround them at East Northport Middle are their second family, the receivers and reciprocators of such genuine respect and affection that their relationships long outlast middle school.
While there’s no doubt that, as individuals, Theresa and John are doing incredible things and leaving indelible marks on the community they live in, things are even better when they’re together. What once were separate worlds have now combined into a collaboration that spans classrooms, clubs, community events and charitable causes.
“We wouldn’t be able to do the things we do without each other,” John said. From pet food drives and televised Groundhog Day segments featuring their canine best friends, to the school’s SHARE club, St. Baldrick’s head-shaving events, the ALS Ride For Life, and their neighborhood’s “I Did the Grid” run, founded in honor of fallen soldier Christopher Scherer, the two work together to raise spirits, awareness and money all year long.
“I can’t imagine it any other way,” Theresa said.
The face and frontman
Those not familiar with the Brauns would likely recognize John as the ENMS mascot – or rather, mohawk –behind the school’s St. Baldrick’s fundraising efforts. Conceived right here in Northport, the St. Baldrick's Foundation has raised hundreds of millions of dollars since its inception in 1999, and is now the largest charity funder of childhood cancer research grants. The foundation held its first head-shaving event at Napper Tandy’s in 2000, and in 2006 John got involved as a way to honor his best friend’s brother, who died of leukemia. John’s first head-shaving, which occurred at the middle school during a live broadcast of Tiger TV, brought awareness about the foundation into the school. Expecting to raise a couple hundred dollars, John brought in over a thousand. John’s colleagues rallied around him and the next year, he did it again. A student said that he too would have taken part in the head shaving had he known about it in time. And that’s when John’s efforts to build an ENMS team began.
To bring even more attention to the event and get people to participate, John grew a promotional mohawk, and dyed it green. “The first year it was huge, it would hit the roof of my car,” he said. Sporting the eye-catching hairdo for the month leading up to the St. Baldrick’s event worked. In 2009, their first year as a team, the ENMS Bald Tigers raised nearly $17,000 for the foundation. This past March, the team’s 45 members brought in over $23,000 (the Bald Tigers team has brought in over $350,000 to date).
The event is now district-wide, with teams from schools participating in the annual head-shaving at Northport High School. Every year for 18 years, John has his mohawk shaved down to the skin. Every year, Theresa does “90 percent of the work” from behind the scenes, he said.
What about the bagpipes?
To honor his Scottish grandmother, John –of Scottish, Irish and German ancestry – researched his family tartan and wore a kilt with its colors on it to his 2011 wedding. “Once he got the kilt, the lovely man who made it said, ‘Well, if you want to wear that more often, you should learn to play the bagpipes,’” Theresa recalled.
So John took lessons, learning at first to play while stationary, and then to march and play.
“I think what’s adorable about him is that even before the bagpipes, he was interested in playing violin, because he wanted to play the Irish fiddle, so he joined the 6th grade orchestra for a while to learn,” Theresa said, smiling.
After practicing both instruments, John decided to stick with the one he considered himself to be better at. He’s been playing the bagpipes ever since, including at numerous school events every year, from St. Baldrick’s to the district’s Relay for Life event.
Different but the same
A self-proclaimed “townie,” John went to ENMS and graduated from Northport High School. Theresa grew up on a farm in a small town outside of Binghamton called Hanco*ck. She attended SUNY Oswego and did graduate work near Albany, while John was at SUNY Cortland.
Theresa knew in her gut she would be a counselor. “Hands down, I knew it,” she said.
John had a different start to his career. “If you would have told me I was going to be a teacher in middle school, I would have laughed,” he said. School did not come easy for him, he said; he did well but had to work really hard.
His studies took him from being a physical education major to science to bio education. But it wasn’t until his first day of student teaching, in a middle school in Cortland, that everything fell into place. He credits one of his mentors and earliest supporters, Sally Horak – the way she interacted with her students and allowed John to engage with the kids, allowed him to be creative –for helping him recognize that his “happy place” was in front of a classroom. “Now I couldn’t think of doing anything else,” he said.
When he returned to East Northport, John immediately got a job at the middle school. In his classroom, John tries to make his science lessons as hands-on, interesting and relevant as he can. “I have a hard time sitting down, so I understand a kid who needs to get up and move,” he said. He incorporates forensic science into his school-year opening unit on properties of matter and, when teaching the periodic table, always includes his tried-and-true cereal box project in which students are assigned a random element to “market” via a cereal box; tin (Sn on the periodic table) becomes CapTIN Crunch, for example. Outside John’s classroom is a Cereal Box Hall of fame, displaying the best creations from over two decades of assignments.
Theresa, on the other hand, worked three leave replacements in the district before landing a permanent job at ENMS.
“I do think my small town upbringing helped get me ready for Northport-East Northport,” she said. “Everything happens for a reason, brings you where you need to be.”
John and Theresa are now approaching their 24th year with the district, at the middle school, in the same positions they were first hired for.
“I think it’s helped us build a good community here,” Theresa said. “ We want as much face-to-face time with our kids as possible. They look forward to every part of what we run and do. If we were in different places, if we’d been moved around, we wouldn’t have had the same following of kids and siblings.”
Theresa has counseled entire families over spans of time: “I do love that about my job,” she said. “It’s amazing to have the fifth kid in a family, and they’ve known me for years.” Though it took her a little while to acclimate to her new home, as opposed to John (“Everyone knew John,” she said), the kids, the parents, the staff, and the connections so prevalent in the Northport-East Northport community made the transition easier.
One of Theresa’s role models, former ENMS counselor Rob Jacobs, helped Theresa cement her place in the district. “He told me from day one, ‘This is your community. You belong here,’” she said. She knows now that he was right.
Jacobs, who was John’s counselor at ENMS, was very in tune with both the students and the counselors on staff. “He taught me how important it was to do everything you could do. If you can be there for a kid, in whatever way, whether in a club, whether it’s just staying after school, just to be there for them,” Theresa said.
She detailed her efforts, from 6th to 8th grade, that have her spending time with her kids in both small groups and as individuals, pushing in DASA (Dignity for All Students Act) lessons, while also tackling stress, depression and suicide prevention, and a high school planning piece that includes students and their parents.
“Step by step, that’s how I get to know my kids,” she said. “And I love every minute of it.”
Jacobs, who had since retired, passed away earlier this year. John played the bagpipes at his memorial service.
Animal attraction
A bearded dragon named Burton, a rabbit named Hopscotch, a Siberian chipmunk named Ninja who long outlived her life expectancy. Add some turtles and a hedgehog and you’ll have an understanding of the array of classroom pets John has had over the years.
“I’ve always been a crazy animal person,” Theresa said, recalling her upbringing on a farm upstate. “I met my match. Just a crazy science teacher version.”
Inspired by his own middle school teacher, Chris Pendergast, John began his teaching career with animals in tow. A beloved elementary school teacher, Pendergast kept a “habitat house” of enough animals to fill two classrooms in Pulaski Road Elementary School, John said. Like his former teacher, John kept a classroom pet for years, up until the new guidelines of Covid discouraged it in school. Tributes to those pets, a paw print crawling up John’s arm in honor of Ninja, for example, along with remembrances of their dogs and cat, have found a permanent home on Theresa and John.
“All of our tattoos are memories of our pets and people,” John said. Some of their current pets still visit school when possible.
On Groundhog Day, Theresa and John bring their dogs into ENMS to help predict when spring will arrive. At first, the couple’s two pugs, or “Pugsutawney”s, would headline the event, which was broadcast on Tiger TV. More recently, Sirius and Orion, dachshunds “sent from the stars” by their late pugs, are the main –and more feisty – participants in the annual tradition. Another longstanding tradition was the Hopscotch Award, given to students who took time out of their lunch periods to take care of and play with the namesake rabbit. Always a counselor, Theresa explained how the award also served to acknowledge those kids who, at the end of the year, might not have raked in other award certificates. The honor soon became a coveted award, with students competing –in acts of kindness – to win it.
“Many of those kids are out of college now,” Theresa and John said, chuckling. (Hopscotch has since passed but Theresa continues to give out certificates for good character.)
It’s all about connection
Together, Theresa and John run the 7th and 8th grade SHARE (Students Helping And Relating to Eachother) club which, from the third grade on, provides a place for natural helpers and leaders to be together, support local initiatives and, as they get older, “come talk about what’s happening at school,” Theresa said. It’s a place to unwind and unload, she said, and running the club is such an honor and joy for the Brauns that they choose to host it all year long.
“Having those conversations with the kids and seeing them develop and grow over the years, that’s my favorite,” Theresa said. Advising the club and being able to hear from students outside of the classroom has made John an even better teacher, she said.
Many of their SHARE students participated in and helped promote the second annual ALS walkathon at ENMS, held on May 9 by the school’s National Junior Honor Society in support of the ALS Ride For Life. Chris Pendergast, the much loved teacher with all those class pets, founded Ride For Life in 1997, a year after John graduated from Northport High School. Pendergast bravely led a decades-long fight with ALS before passing away in 2020. Last month, Theresa and John –in their capacity as SHARE advisors and in honor of John’s father Francis, who passed away in March 2022 from ALS, joined over 130 students in the walkathon.
Prior to the event, members of SHARE invite Ride For Life patients to visit ENMS, giving the students perhaps their first exposure to people with ALS. Leading up to the walkathon, students paint motivational posters and promote fundraising. It’s a real-life experience many kids don’t forget.
“That's our biggest thing,” Theresa said. “We want the experience to stay with them. The reasons behind their actions, the connections to our community, it’s all for a reason. The connection part is huge, and if we can share that with anyone, we try to.”
That connection, that starts in the classroom, or counseling room, extends into everything Theresa and John do with their kids.
The students reciprocate the feeling, John said, and have helped him through hard times as well, like when Leslie Spanko, a longtime ENMS teacher, inspirational colleague and close friend of John’s passed away in 2013, and when his father passed away just two years ago. “Being in the classroom, working with the kids, helped me get through that,” he said. He spoke of the kids and how respectful and compassionate they are – always bringing him back to his happy place.
I never go away…
Both John and Theresa thank East Northport Middle School’s “very supportive community of staff and teachers” for helping, advocating for and promoting the various activities they believe in so much. “We’re never on our own, completely,” John said.
And neither are their students.
Theresa said she tells her kids all the time: “I never go away.” During Covid she sent her 8th graders handwritten and personalized notes, because they were deprived of all the customary happenings of a normal graduation. “But now I can’t stop,” she said, remembering that it’s time to start writing them again for this year. “Every kid needs that,” she said.
From incorporating animal (specifically dog and cat) behavior into a social-emotional learning/science lesson about observation and inferences, to showing up at a former student’s music gig, and taking part in numerous community events, the Brauns are positively impacting their students, friends and neighbors every day. “It would be weird to not live here and teach here,” John said. “I think it does help us take our jobs to a different place. It's not a job, it’s our neighbors, where we live, what we do.”
Living, teaching, and making connections in East Northport is a package deal the Brauns are incredibly grateful for: “I feel very lucky that we have that,” Theresa said. “I could never leave, this is the best experience of my life.”
