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Home > Blogs > Springfield Schools News and Issues > Archives > 2008 > October > 21
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
New state superintendent named
The state board of education last week selected Deborah Delisle to serve as the next superintendent of Ohio.
Delisle is currently the superintendent of Cleveland Heights-University Heights, an urban system. She will replace Superintendent Susan Tave Zelman, who departs — after very public criticism from Gov. Ted Strickland — to take a position with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Zelman ends her nine year tenure in Ohio in December.
Two things about Delisle that I’m going to mention here briefly. The first is that she is from Ohio, so she would already be familiar with education regulations and policies as well as the history here. Zelman was an out of state candidate who had been working in state education departments and academia for several years before her appointment here. The other finalist for the position currently works for the state education department.
The second is that Delisle has been at the helm of an urban district since 2003; prior to that she was with Cleveland Heights as an associate superintendent. So she’s familiar with urban education and it’s intricacies. As an urban district, Cleveland Heights is one of the smaller of Ohio’s 21 urban systems, but has a larger percentage of economically disadvantaged kids and a very diverse student body. Before Cleveland Heights, Delisle worked in several suburban districts of varying wealth and diversity.
Cleveland Heights has been a fairly innovative urban district and is also one of just a handful that have reached Ohio’s “Effective” designation on the state report card. It’s part of a partnership that started one of the biggest pushes I’m aware of in Ohio for a Mandarin Chinese-English language program. The district also has a program to provide every teacher and student in grades 6-12 with a laptop by 2012.
And — this will sound familiar — Cleveland Heights has one large high school will five small schools, the same type of small schools concept Springfield recently adopted.
What do you think?
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Students tour downtown Springfield
I joined Lagonda Elementary third graders today for a walking tour of downtown Springfield.
Covenant Presbyterian Church each year provides a walking tour for the district’s third graders, even going so far as to pay for busing. In small groups of 7 or so, the kids join tour guides - church members- to walk down Limestone learning about the city’s history, architecture and functions of downtown buildings.
As a newcomer to Springfield, I found the tour interesting. It’s a bit chilly out today but the kids seemed very excited.
And the teacher I spoke to, Thor Bisher, raved about the tour. And there’s a good reason.
The volunteers who lead this tour have gone so far as to align the trip with Ohio’s third grade standards for local government and history content.
A lot of the big field trip destinations - museums, for example - do this now; align their field trip programs to the content.
But for a local operation, this extra step is a nice addition. The kids will meet Mayor Warren Copeland later this afternoon and local attorney Jim Lagos lets them go up in his office to look over the city square from his balcony view, learned about A.B. Graham and 4-H and other county and local government operations lining Limestone - including the News-Sun.
Look for more on this trip in tomorrow’s paper. Read more on education at our education blog.
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