Over 35 years ago, a visit to a St. Paul group home where English teacher Don Pults’ girlfriend worked, sparked a passion of a lifetime advocating for safe, accessible lives for people of different abilities.

“My wife Tina arranged for an outing with one of the clients at the group home; we went to the Como Zoo together and spent the day there, and I fell in love with the work,” Pults said.

Since then, they have dedicated their lives to both education and ensuring people with different abilities have a place they can call home.

In the 1990’s, Pults began his work at a White Bear Lake group home as a Qualified Intellectual Development Professional. “It’s just a fancy term for making sure our clients have good goals and programming to learn and grow, as well as following state and federal laws and regulations. We have 6 bedrooms in our one little home, and the 6 people I work with are wonderful,” Pults said.

Part of his job includes getting the residents out to enjoy the community, go to school and work programs and all the things that are valuable for people to contribute to society.

Pults began his teaching career in 2007. In 2022, he took a job at Stillwater Area High school. He not only teaches English, but he runs the Kabekonian yearbook staff. He was the yearbook advisor at his previous job for 11 years, and was requested to take it on as a part of teaching here. He agreed to do so and Pults shared that this required managing three classes of students who work to create the yearbook, plus hours and hours of proofreading, emailing parents, students and teachers both during and outside of school hours, and balancing it with all of the other decisions and tasks.

“There are a lot of things that I do love about doing the yearbook. I love being able to feature things like the cheer squad; I love being able to highlight the things that students do here because students do a lot of great things. I love to put together a good book that people look at when they get it and they are excited to see themselves and their friends and they get really excited about seeing the yearbook,” Pults said.

In 2024, Pults and the yearbook team received the Pictavo Top 100 Award based on its superior standards. He also happens to be a union representative for the faculty.

“Like a lot of people, I really don’t like to talk about myself that much,” Pults said. He is humble about his accomplishments.

Pults was able to share that he would like to be remembered as, “someone who cares for kids, someone who genuinely has a passion for teaching and a passion for students, because that is why we all do it.”