In September of 1996, first-year teacher and coach Dominic Albano held the first annual Union Hill Cross Country Meet at Empire State Mine. Dressed as a cowboy, with the theme songs from “Bonanza” and other TV westerns playing on his boombox, Coach Albano and a few volunteers coaxed and cheered 40 local runners along a dusty course marked out on the abandoned grounds of Grass Valley’s famous old mine.
On September 11, 2024, Coach Albano held the annual Union Hill Cross Country Meet, with 564 runners competing from 23 schools, supported by over 60 volunteers, with hundreds of spectators.
And each spring, Dominic hosts the annual Union Hill Track and Field Meet for the same schools, athletes, and parents from throughout the California foothills and valley, another event that started quite small three decades ago and has expanded due to Dominic’s commitment and enthusiasm. Both the track meets, as well as the reputation of their founder, have become well respected throughout the area. Except during Covid, they have been held every year.
“When I started that first year,” he says, “I had coached soccer for years, but the principal needed a cross-country and track coach, so he called me in and said, ‘Dominic, you look like a natural born runner. Congratulations. You have a new assignment.’”
And just a few months after the 1996 track meet, right after 8th grade graduation, Dominic volunteered to act as tour guide for a group of graduates and their parents on a trip to Washington, D.C., an inspirational one-week visit to our nation’s capital. Except for the Covid years, the graduation trip has been held every year since. “It has become something very special for me,” says Dominic. “I get to spend time with my former 4th graders, appreciate how much they have matured, and get a good glimpse of the young adults they are becoming.”
And as if all that were not enough, back in ’96, Dominic also found the time and energy to lead a two-day California History field trip from Grass Valley to Sonora; the trip has since become another annual Union Hill tradition. Students experience firsthand what they studied in 4th grade, visiting the places where gold was discovered and seeing the historic towns along Highway 49, the haunts of John Sutter, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and of course, the notorious Charles Boles—better known as Black Bart—the man who robbed 28 Wells Fargo stagecoaches in the 1870’s and 1880’s.
On the first 49ner trip, during a scheduled stop in San Andreas, where Black Bart was eventually tried and convicted for his many robberies, Dominic slipped away and changed into a long duster coat, a flour sack hood with cut-out eye holes, and a bowler hat, Black Bart’s preferred outfit. Before he could act out a planned hold-up skit, he saw the apprehension in everyone’s eyes, so the first-year teacher quickly pulled off his hat and hood and smiled sheepishly. “It’s me, everyone! Dominic!” he said. Parents and kids alike had a good laugh.
That night, he put the costume on again while he told one of his many campfire stories. Known as a master storyteller, Dominic will soon publish a collection of Black Bart stories, his second children’s book. Last year, in collaboration with a former student, he published, “Sam and Beauregard,” a collection of tall tales about an old gold miner and his beloved dog, who have a knack for getting into one tight spot after another.
But why, getting back to coaching, did Dominic dress up as a cowboy for those first few cross country meets and play corny western music for his runners? And why would an otherwise sensible 4th grade teacher stick a flour sack over his head and pretend to be a stagecoach bandit?
“For as long as I can remember, my two passions were teaching and the Wild West. I knew I wanted to be a teacher when I was seven years old,” he says. “And while I was in college, I built a half-scale western town on my dad’s property in Penn Valley. The town, which I named Dusty Falls, was a popular attraction with friends and neighbors, so I decided to put on several summer camps for kids. We offered wagon rides, games, cowboys, stories around the campfire, and even teepees for the children to sleep in. We had about 50 kids that first year, and more than 75 by the second summer. I was still in teacher training, but I think the summer camps taught me as much about teaching as anything.”
And while the summer camps, the field trips, and the track meets are all impressive accomplishments, Dominic chokes up when he discusses his true passion, classroom teaching.
“We serve,” he says. “At core, the service is what I love about my profession. In serving others, we come to appreciate all that we have, all that we have been given. We encounter kids who suffer food insecurity at home and come to school hungry. We serve them, serve them all. We shower them with love and encouragement and do the best we can for them in the limited time we are given.”
Dominic especially loves teaching 4th grade: “It’s such an important transitional year, emotionally and intellectually. We excel in our reading program, providing intervention for those behind on their phonics or vocabulary, and emphasizing comprehension. We use narrative sequences and age-appropriate literature that the kids respond to and analyze.”
Dominic draws on his Sam and Beauregard stories to enliven his low-tech lessons in language arts, math, science, and history. “Our kids score well on tests in general,” says Dominic. “Some are behind coming in, but I’m amazed, year after year, at how much improvement they make in coming up to grade level by the end of the year.”
Nevertheless, in January of 2025, populist politicians and cable-news pundits pointed to 4th grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to scapegoat teachers and public schools, justifying more cuts to public education, which they claim is failing our kids. But research released this year by the American Enterprise Institute offers a commonsense explanation for America’s reading crisis: students’ test scores directly reflect the reading habits, skills, and attitudes of the adults in their lives. Many Americans refuse to acknowledge that smartphones, televisions, and computers are far more popular in American households than books, as well as the impact all that screen time is having on the reading skills and habits of young and old alike.
“Parents get from the educational system what they put into it,” says Dominic. “If they put in the effort with their children to read to them and provide a positive home learning environment, they generally get great results. Those who don’t put in the effort are often the first to say, “that darn school or that darn teacher, they aren’t teaching my kid anything.”
A 2025 Gallup poll reveals that 73% of Americans are dissatisfied with public education, an utterly confounding paradox for dedicated public-school teachers everywhere, since the same adults, when asked about their local public schools or their own children’s teachers, express strong satisfaction.
Year after year, public school teachers like Dominic are berated by right-wing politicians and demoralized by national opinion polls. They are dismayed as the new Administration in Washington is determined to disable or shut down the Department of Education, which will inevitably disrupt funding for special education and low-income schools. Yet they return to their classrooms, steadfastly committed to the well-being of children and adolescents.
Here’s to you, Dominic. And here’s to our public-school teachers.
There are 530 full-time public-school teachers in Nevada County.
This story was about one of them.