April 26, 2007

By Diane Chiddister

On Tuesday, April 24, the Yellow Springs Exempted School District announced that it had hired a new superintendent to take over the position of Superintendent Tony Armocida, who is retiring from the job after 10 years.

Norman Glismann, currently principal at Bryan High School in Bryan, Ohio, will take over Armocida’s position on Aug. 1.

The school board unanimously chose Glismann for the position, according to Board President Angela Wright on Tuesday. He was chosen from 30 applicants after a year-long search process.

“All the candidates were well qualified, but we only had one position,” Wright said. “He came out as the best match for Yellow Springs.”

Glismann, 52, has been an educator for 31 years, he said in a phone interview Tuesday. Initially a teacher of English for nine years, Glismann served as a high school principal in Arlington, Neb., before becoming superintendent of the Rochester Catholic Schools in Rochester, Minn. He also served as superintendent of the Houston-Galveston Diocese School System in Texas before becoming principal at Bryan three years ago. He holds bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

He has about 12 to 14 years left in his career and hopes to spend them all in Yellow Springs, Glismann said.

Initially attracted to the Yellow Springs job by the small size of the district, Glismann became very interested after visiting the district’s Web site, he said on Tuesday. Especially, he was impressed with the amount of arts education and creative projects that he saw there.

“It seemed a lot of terrific things were happening in the school district,” Glismann said. He was also impressed with the schools’ high performance on state tests and the number of National Merit Scholars, he said.

He brings to the job a variety of experience, and considers himself to have “good people person skills” and the ability to work collaboratively with staff, board members and community members, Glismann said. He said that he is “very much a student advocate. I’m passionate about education.”

Especially, he believes that students thrive when they feel valued and appreciated in the classroom, he said.

“I believe that education is about relationships,” he said. “If you have positive relationships, you’ll have a high achieving school.”

Glismann is divorced and the father of three daughters, who range in age from fifth grade to college age. He plans to move to Yellow Springs, he said.

The announcement followed a year-long search by a committee composed of community members, teachers, school administrators and school board members, according to a press release. The process involved surveys which were sent to every household and 10 community forums to determine what the community wanted in a new superintendent. With the help of search consultant Mary Rita Weissman, the committee conducted preliminary interviews and narrowed the applicants to four semifinalists. All of the semifinalists came to Yellow Springs for interviews, and were interviewed by the committee, which was co-chaired by board members Anne Erickson and Richard Lapedes. Finally, the committee recommended three candidates to the school board, which met with the finalists.

The process worked very well, according to Wright.

“I thought the process was a good one, and we had a fabulous committee which worked together well,” she said.

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com