Messmer visits Holland Elementary, highlights students as Dubois County’s future

Kindergarten and fourth-grade classrooms at Holland Elementary got a direct connection to Washington when U.S. Rep. Mark Messmer visited the Dubois County school, a reminder that the county’s future voters, workers and civic leaders are already sitting in local desks.

Messmer, a Jasper resident, represents Indiana’s 8th Congressional District, which includes Dubois County. He was elected to Congress in 2024 and sworn in in 2025, and he now serves on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, making a stop at an elementary school especially relevant to the work he says touches education issues and the people it affects most.

At Holland Elementary, part of the Southwest Dubois County School Corporation, the visit put a federal officeholder in front of students who are just beginning to learn how government works and why representation matters. The school is led by principal Jacob Moyes, and the kindergarten classrooms include teachers Krista Gogel and Jessica Lechner, educators who spend their days shaping the habits, questions and confidence of the district’s youngest students.

Messmer’s own background also fits the setting. His biography says he and his wife Kim have four children and have been married 39 years, and that he previously served on the Holy Family School Board. Those ties help explain why school relationships and education policy have remained part of his public profile as he serves the district from offices in Jasper, Evansville and Washington.

His office also handles constituent services that reach beyond day-to-day legislative work, including the annual Congressional Art Competition and Washington, D.C. tour requests, part of a broader effort to keep students and families connected to the institutions that represent them. For a school in Holland, that kind of contact matters because it shows children that government is not abstract or distant, but something shaped by people from their own region who answer to the same communities they call home.

In a county where school hallways often become the first place children encounter civic lessons, Messmer’s visit linked classroom curiosity with public service and reinforced a simple message: Dubois County’s future is already growing up in places like Holland Elementary.