One Family, Four Generations of USM Graduates

While touring USM’s Preschool in 2021 for their oldest son, Jessica ’06 and Andy ’03 Lane bumped into a familiar face: Susie Bach, Jessica’s kindergarten teacher (who has since retired). “Even though I was wearing a mask due to COVID, she still remembered my name and the names of my classmates all these years later,” said Jessica. That encounter solidified their decision. “How could we not come here and give our kids that same sort of experience?”

Their children follow a long line of USM graduates. Andy and his sister, Ginny ’01, both graduated from USM. Their parents, Diane and Doug, graduated from USM in 1967 and 1966, respectively, and their grandparents on both sides attended USM’s predecessor schools in the 1930s and ’40s.

Andy’s parents, like himself and Jessica, wanted their children to attend USM as they had. But even they were surprised by how positive the USM experience would be for their kids. “At the end of Ginny’s first day of 1st grade, she came out of class skipping,” recalled Diane. “The whole school was extraordinary. We enrolled Andy in kindergarten the next year.”  

Diane loves returning to campus, whether to attend special events like Grandparents and Special Friends Day or to pick up her grandchildren up at the end of the school day. “It’s always so much fun,” she said. “I point out areas of the building that I used when I was a student, and sometimes I even run into classmates of mine.” Jessica, too, loves being reminded of her time as a student. “Whenever I see the sign for Liz Krieg Field, I remember when she was my field hockey coach,” she said.

Although Diane’s mother, a Milwaukee Downer Seminary alumna from 1940, passed away before her great-grandchildren started at USM, Diane knows she also would have loved to visit them at school. “Oh, she’d have been here in a heartbeat,” said Diane. “She would have loved every second of it.”