Springfield Schools News and Issues

About Springfield Schools News and Issues

Megan Gildow of the News-Sun newspaper in Springfield, Ohio, covers local school districts, their teachers, students and anything in between. Districts she covers include: Springfield City Schools, Clark-Shawnee Local Schools, Northeastern Local Schools, Northwestern Local Schools, Tecumseh Local Schools, Southeastern Local Schools, Greenon Local Schools, Catholic Central Schools, Emmanuel Christian, and area charter schools.

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• Board to hear committee recommendations tonight
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Home > Blogs > Springfield Schools News and Issues > Archives > 2008 > October > 21 > Entry

New state superintendent named

By Megan Gildow | Tuesday, October 21, 2008, 03:14 PM

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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