Mount Ayr principal receives fine arts award

After suddenly stepping into the unknown world of high school speech last winter, Mount Ayr High School principal Josh Vanderflught has been honored with the Iowa High School Speech Association’s 2024 Fine Arts Administrator Award.

The annual award is the highest honor the IHSSA can give to an administrator and is presented “to a distinguished individual of statewide reputation and outstanding accomplishments.” Vanderflught received the award Friday during the IHSSA Coaches Convention in Ames

Not involved in the past, Vanderflught was thrust into the world of speech in January following the untimely death of Mount Ayr speech coach Shaun Kniep’s husband Clint. Kniep’s husband died Jan. 26, just four days before IHSSA’s district large group contest. Kniep has been the sole speech coach at Mount Ayr for years, so no one else at the school had the experience to bring the students to the contest.

“After my husband unexpectedly passed away, the first thing Josh told me was not to worry about anything,” Kniep said in her nomination of Vanderflught. “He ran speech meetings, scheduled rehearsals, scheduled transportation, took the team to district speech contest, even made sure they had their comment sheets, and above all made sure all the students had fun at contest.”

She explained Vanderflught did all this while continuing his normal duties and welcoming both his brother and parents into his home after they all experienced medical issues.

Various Mount Ayr students wrote in favor of the nomination as well. Mya Sackett, now a freshman at Iowa State, share what Vanderflught’s help meant to the speech students.

“Without Mr. Vanderflught’s determination to get us there, we could not have performed as well as we did. Maybe we wouldn’t have been there at all,” Sackett wrote. “He learned everything that he had to within three days and made it successfully through that stressful day. He was the one who was there.”

Vanderflught explained his first speech competition was an interesting learning experience.

“I’d never been to a large group speech competition before. As we come in, I see a group of kids singing, a group of kids rehearsing their acts, chanting… it was scary, especially without Shaun there. I was intimidated walking in there,” Vanderflught said.

However, after working with the students in practices beforehand and successfully completing the competition, he said he has a much greater appreciation for the extracurricular.

“As a former athlete and coach, I’d not had a lot of experience on the fine arts side,” Vanderflught said. “As I got through that day, I really truly did gain an admiration for this group of people and now realize that the skills the students acquire with these activities are skills they’ll carry with them for their whole life.”

Through his newfound appreciation for speech, he also gained more respect for Kniep.

“In Mount Ayr, there’s one name that people think of when they think of speech and drama, and that’s Shaun Kniep,” Vanderflught said. “Mount Ayr is the only school that I’ve ever been at that we have 50 to 70 kids in the play in a 1A school, and that’s because of Mrs. Kniep.”

The 2024/25 speech season begins with large group speech in January.