May 5, 2005

YSHS and McKinney School Principal John Gudgel talking with sophomore Keith Brewton. Gudgel spends much of his time listening to students, which helps him relate well to the kids in his school.

By Diane Chiddister

Follow Yellow Springs High School Principal John Gudgel around the school and you might be surprised to hear how kids talk to him. On a recent morning one girl marched up to tell him she’d be doing her hair in corn rows that night, while another told him she planned to buy new shoes. A third, giggling and shy, whispered that something exciting had happened. That boy she had a crush on? He’d finally said hello.

Even more surprising was Gudgel’s response. With each student, he listened. A different hair style, new shoes — these things are important, his response seemed to say. And to the young girl with the crush, he beamed, clearly sharing in her happiness.

Ask YSHS students how they feel about Gudgel — or “Gudge,” as many call him — and you find they have only good things to say.

“He understands kids in a way most adults don’t,” said junior Aaron Zaremsky.

“He doesn’t treat kids like kids,” said freshman Lara Donnelly.

Superintendent Tony Armocida, who has worked with Gudgel for eight years, said that he is sometimes amazed at how well the principal relates to his students.

“I think he’s the most student-centered administrator I’ve ever worked with. I think he really enjoys working with kids and being with kids,” said Armocida, who also said that Gudgel is “flat out one of the best people I’ve ever known. He’s a truly good person. I feel honored to work with him.”

While someone so well liked by students might run the risk of being too easy on them, Gudgel seems to successfully blend his caring for young people with the right amount of authority to keep things running smoothly.

“It’s mutual respect,” Lara said about why students listen to Gudgel.

“When someone respects you, you respect them,” freshman Rosa Dixon said.

How, Gudgel was asked, did he learn to listen so well?

“My parents were good listeners,” he said. “At family functions I’d watch them and they were never the center of attention. They were listening. They told my sister and I that you can learn a lot by listening.”

A grueling schedule
It’s been 10 years since Gudgel became the principal at YSHS and 25 years since he came to the school, his alma mater, to teach. Each day he wears many hats, including administrator, manager, counselor, disciplinarian and friend.

Gudgel’s work day starts early, about 7:30 a.m. when he gets to school, and often ends late, often after 9 p.m., if there’s an evening function, which happens several times a week. During some parts of the year Gudgel might slip away to his house in Yellow Springs and take a few hours off after school, but in the spring he coaches track each afternoon. The schedule can be grueling, and Gudgel acknowledged that his long hours at work played a part in his divorce several years ago. He paid a huge price for his work habits, he said, and believes he learned a hard lesson.

Now remarried, Gudgel said he wants to put his family first. He tries not to attend every function, to take weekends off. But he seems torn between his own needs and wanting to be there for the kids.

“When they have a game, kids say, ‘will you come?’ ”he said. “And it’s important to be able to come back and say, ‘Hey, I saw you at the game, I saw you when you scored that goal.’ ”

The longest year
While his hours remain long, at least this year isn’t last year, the hardest one in Gudgel’s career. First came the February 2004 discovery of the body of Tim Lopez, a YSHS student who had been missing for two years, in the backyard of his classmate Michael Rittenhouse. Then Rittenhouse was charged with murder. For several weeks, the high school endured a media frenzy as students and teachers tried to cope with their confusion, anger and grief.

It seemed like things couldn’t get any worse, when they did. On a sunny April day, Gudgel heard ambulances down the road and decided to run out and check. It sounded like an accident. Getting closer, he saw a car smashed into a tree and the Miami Township Fire-Rescue squad working on someone. Two high school students had been in the car, he learned, and one had just been taken to the hospital. When the squad stopped working on the second student, senior Arla Smith, he knew she had died.

Then came a blur of decisions, with Gudgel thinking first and foremost of how best to take care of the students. He gathered them into the school gym that afternoon to tell them of their friend’s death, and he will never forget their crying and wailing. The grieving continued over the next weeks, and through graduation, and it wasn’t until summer, Gudgel said, that he could deal with his own grief.

During that year his faith gave him strength, Gudgel said. And there was something else too — every day he’d visit his mother in Friends Care Community. Geneva Gudgel, who died last winter, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and didn’t really understand what her son was saying. But still, John Gudgel said, those visits helped him immensely.

“She was a pillar of strength,” Gudgel said. “To me she was a source of comfort.”

Gudgel remembers clearly the six students who have died, from illness or accident, during his tenure as principal. He lists them: Bobby Robinow, who was hit by lightning; graduate Sally Goldstein, who had an asthma attack; Emily Bailey, who died of a brain tumor; Ami Westendorf; Lopez; and Smith. As principal, he said, there’s nothing harder.

“It’s tough on everyone, on the kids and the staff,” he said. “Maybe you had them in class and suddenly they’re not there. And you’re looking at their empty desk or their locker or missing their smile. You’re dealing with the loss of a loved one.”

Times have changed
Growing up in Yellow Springs, Gudgel never thought he’d end up as principal of Yellow Springs High School.

As a young child he had a serious speech impediment, he said, and for many years endured being pulled out of classes for extra help. He was reluctant to speak because of the problem, and he remembers those years as difficult, and as one of the reasons he empathizes with students who have hard times of their own.

But in other ways, Gudgel remembers his childhood as a happy one.

“Life was simpler then,” he said. “We didn’t have the number of issues then that kids face now. The different forms of peer pressure, the substance abuse, the family problems were not as prevalent then. Kids now are exposed to drugs earlier, to bullying, the pressures of state tests. We didn’t have to do that. It was more ‘Ozzie and Harriet,’ ‘Father Knows Best.’ ”

Gudgel loved running track in high school and although he doesn’t say so, he was a star, leading the 1975 team to the school’s first state title. Because he wanted to coach and he had to be a teacher to do so, Gudgel studied education at the University of Toledo. He loved history, too, so he came to YSHS as a history teacher a few years after he graduated from college.

Gudgel later pursued a master’s degree in guidance counseling from the University of Dayton, and he was happily employed at YSHS as half-time counselor, half-time history teacher when Cynthia Holt, the principal at the time, resigned right before the beginning of school 10 years ago. The superintendent, Ken Yonke, asked Gudgel to step in temporarily, and he’s been in the job ever since.

Things have changed in the past decade, Gudgel said. Especially in the past five years, he’s spent more and more time dealing with discipline problems. Kids seem more lost these days, he said, less able to tell right from wrong. It seems that some kids need to be taught the things that families once taught them, how to treat each other with respect.

“Part of the problem is the society,” Gudgel said. “And part of it is the mindset in this town that it’s OK to question authority. And that’s good, but it needs to be done in a dignified and respectful way. For a young person to verbally assault a teacher because he feels the teacher is doing something uncalled for — more and more we have to deal with that.”

More work to be done
There are other things he’d like to see changed at the school as well. Gudgel would like to update the school’s curriculum so that some teachers do less lecturing and more hands-on activities that engage a student’s whole being. He tries to work with those teachers in these areas, he said, but isn’t always as successful as he’d like to be.

Gudgel wants YSHS to be a place where kids want to come every day, to be an “inviting, exciting place,” he said. He feels good about the school and believes that “the kids as a whole are happy here, feel it’s a safe place.”

Gudgel, however, won’t compliment his work without acknowledging that some things could be better.

“There are some kids here who aren’t happy, who feel they don’t have friends,” he said. “Some kids slip under the radar. We need to do a better job with them.”

Gudgel doesn’t shy away from areas in which he feels he needs improvement, and offers that he needs to work on being more of an authority figure. His teachers sometimes push him in that direction, he said, and he does his best, although his inclination is more toward being a counselor, a listener.

Noting that he’s feeling a bit weary, Gudgel said he probably won’t be in this job forever.

“Ten years is a long time,” he said. “It’s a tough grind. A part of me is looking for other challenges.”

But each day as principal offers a challenge as well. Even after 25 years at YSHS, Gudgel said he’s still amazed that he is a part of each young person’s growth, to see seventh-graders enter the school as wide-eyed children and, six years later, leave as mature young women and men.

It’s a fascinating process, he said, and he’s grateful to be a part of it, to do his best to guide young people on a good path, to hear the big and small things they share with him each day and to listen.