Great Strides Emerge From Uncommon Adversity.

A self-described "neatnik" who craves orderliness, Howard Hull is someone who spends waking hours away from his office writing memos to his staff and preparing agendas for the next 18 months.

During the past year he even provided time management workshops for employees and bought some of them Day-timers to keep their schedules straight.

Yet Hull, superintendent of the Smith-Green Schools in Churubusco, Ind., has discovered some of the more profound lessons in life grow out of the unexpected and unwanted--professional and personal adversity.

From his rocky start as a district-level administrator in the mid-1980s, Hull learned the importance of interpersonal relationships in school reform. "When I made the change from high school to central office, I changed too much too fast and produced great change without great input," he recalls of his efforts to standardize the middle school curriculum in the Wawasee, Ind., Community Schools.

"I discovered no change will endure unless those affected are also those who are involved in an organized process," he adds.

Hull applied the lesson from that rough welcome to district management during his first year as SmithGreen's superintendent, when the 1,550-student school corporation underwent accreditation by the Indiana Department of Education and the North Central Association. The district emerged as one of only two in Indiana to be accredited fully by both.

"We rallied around a scientific approach as opposed to promoting education simply as an art," he says. "This pulled the staff together and they got to quickly see how much I value their input. Of course it helped that I found, organized, and compensated ways to receive that input."

On the personal side, the 41-year-old Hull has beaten steep odds to overcome chronic mylogenous leukemia, an ominous diagnosis he received just a few months into his Smith-Green superintendency in January 1989. He was told he had two years to live unless a perfect bone marrow match could be made.

He plunged himself into the search and ultimately, with the help of the American Red Cross, found a willing donor in North Carolina. The transplant and recovery took four months away from the job.

Hull recently learned he no longer needs periodic reexaminations at Indiana University Hospital in Bloomington. He's been cured.

A devout Christian who prays daily, Hull knows he's fortunate to still be alive. "There's a stronger sense of missionary in me," he says. "I was spared and am alive. I want to do something that contributes to this earth."

Community leaders in Churubusco, located just north of Fort Wayne, recognize the unique spirit they have in Hull, who was named Indiana's 1994 state superintendent of the year. "He lives his life the way most people should--every day to the fullest," says Vivian Rosswurm, editor of the weekly Churubusco News. "He goes out of his way to help a lot of people."

Rosswurm knows first-hand of Hull's sense of organization since she edits the superintendent's twice-a-month guest column. "He's weeks early with it," she quips.

Hull also has developed something of a penny-pincher reputation in his professional spending habits. He says Smith-Green board members still kid him "about putting them in the Westward Ho instead of the Marriott at their first AASA convention together."

Last summer, during a professional development seminar he attended in Chicago, he saved the district $140 in hotel accommodations by sleeping in his car parked inside the Hilton's garage. "It was a lot noisier than I imagined," he says of the novel experience.

Elizabeth Leitch, Smith-Green's board vice-president, chuckles over the cost-savings efforts. "We're getting him to loosen up a little bit, but he's still real frugal."

With his physical health restored, Hull says he's now "trying to productively use the extra life God gave me." He's eager to share that outlook and does it in part through slogans across the bottom of his memo pads.

One reads: "Are you living like you'd want to live if this were the last month of your life?"