Hall of Fame: Sandy Cheney

Sandy Cheney has lived in Tea since 1975, and when the school district started, she got involved. While all of her and her husband, Ray’s children graduated from Lennox by 1999, they were seeing and living with kids all over Tea and the school did not have enough capacity so she got involved.

“The thing that I took on was when it came time to be deciding the boundaries for the district, information was in the paper, but to my knowledge nobody received any other notification in the mail or anything as far as whether their property was in the Lennox district or in the Tea district or if it was on the margins where they could preference,” she said.

She did a lot of walking neighborhoods and knocking on doors to give people information for them to read about the boundaries. When it came to people who were near the boundary lines, she helped property owners go through the minor boundary process if they wanted to change which district their property was in.

She filed at least 24 minor boundary petitions with the county at the time.

“I was just thinking about where do people want their kids to go or people that were thinking resale,” Cheney said.

Cheney and her husband grew up on farms in Kingsbury County. She graduated in the last class to graduate from Irwin and he graduated from Arlington. He went to Vietnam. When he returned, they lived in Washington state for a year and a half before moving back to the Midwest.

They agreed to live wherever they both found work, which they found in Sioux Falls. When they bought their first home in Tea, the population was less than 300 people with gravel roads. 

Cheney was in college at Augustana when he was in Vietnam. She was working part-time at Western Bell telephone company. When they moved back to South Dakota, her work at the telephone company helped her get a full-time job with them. Throughout her 21 years of employment with the company, she was let go and rehired six times when they would downsize and then rehire. She also spent her time working in insurance, banking, post office, housecleaning, painting and worked in a dental office.

Cheney was surprised by the announcement that she was being inducted into the Hall of Fame. Her husband was inducted in 2022.

“There’s so many people that have done so much. I scraped gum off desks. We got everything used from other school districts. I just tried to be supportive since then,” she said.

They have had five grandchildren go through the Tea Area School District. She said it has been good. She remains active with the scholarship fund that they started in 2003.