Former FAFB commander new Cheney schools head
Larry Keller spent 27 years in military

CHENEY – A former vice wing commander at Fairchild Air Force Base has taken his leadership skills to Cheney Public Schools.
Larry Keller, 59, is the new superintendent of the district, replacing Mike Dunn, who left Cheney to become the superintendent of Educational School District 101.
Keller comes to Cheney after spending five years as the principal and superintendent of the Mansfield and Pateros school districts in North Central Washington.
“My dream had been to someday compete for the Cheney position,” said Keller, who started in his new post July 1.
Keller spent 27 years in the military before retiring with the rank of colonel in 1998.
He earned his teaching certificate in 1971 in health, physical education and special education. He said he went into the Air Force to become a pilot and never expected to make a career out of it, but found that he loved what he was doing.
Upon his retirement, he wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do but knew he wanted to work with kids.
He started by brushing up on his skills by taking some education classes at Eastern Washington University. While there, he met a math teacher from the St. John-Endicott district who recommended he work as a substitute teacher for a year. Keller soon began teaching in the special education program and was hired at that district in the fall of 2000.
“Twenty-seven years in the service helped me learn a lot about leadership,” he said. Even with that experience, he felt that he needed to brush up his skills from an educational standpoint.
While he was teaching, he continued taking classes in leadership and entered the principal program and eventually the superintendent program at Washington State University.
When he was hired as principal and superintendent in Mansfield in 2003, the district had a house designated for the superintendent. Keller kept his house near Fairchild while working at Mansfield and continued to visit it every couple of months. That house will serve him well, since the Cheney district was hoping to find a superintendent who was willing to live in the district.
There were 102 students in the Mansfield district when Keller took the job, and he soon found that he was wearing many hats. He said he learned quickly about transportation, special education, food service, counseling and business management.
“One of his big focuses was improving the appearance of the buildings, both inside and out,” said Tyler Caille, the chairman of the school board in Mansfield.
Caille added that Keller left the reserve funds in the district with more money than what the district had when he first arrived and that Keller was able to maintain an athletics program in the district – something that the district almost lost. There was talk about combining the athletic program with another district at the time.
“He is a loss for the district,” Caille said. “Cheney has a good person.”
Keller has a plan for his new district, as well. He wants to come up with and implement a 10-year strategic building plan in order to deal with the growth of the district, which includes Cheney, Airway Heights and some parts of Spokane.
He said that he wants to run and operate the schools well every day.
“(I want us to) be great stewards of the resources the community provides us with,” he said.
Now that Keller is back in the community, he can spend more time with his son, Jeff, who works just down the street from him at Cheney Credit Union. His daughter, Kari, is the executive director of a foundation of an assisted-living community in the Seattle area, and his wife, Karen, is a teacher as well. She worked as a consumer family sciences teacher in the Waterville district while Keller worked in Mansfield and Pateros. She might try to find a teaching job in the area.
Keller feels that he brings to the district his leadership skills, life experiences, skills as a communicator, a passion for kids and energy focused on wanting to make a difference.
He said he is spending time getting to know the staff and the residents of the community this summer and wants to be a visible part of the community.
“What you see with me is what you get,” he said.