“I guess what I really wanted to do was to be a leader who would be there for the district, for the staff, somebody who would be able to work well with the staff and be well-respected,” he said. “Even as a principal, I always felt that if you have a good relationship with your staff, you could really accomplish anything. The people will be behind you and be supportive of you. They’ll do what they need to do to make you a success if they know that you care about them and the children that they work with on a daily basis.”
Not getting any easier
Gretzinger described the different responsibilities of a superintendent as “vast,” and said that in many ways the job became more challenging with each passing year.
“I think that’s only because of the fact that each year we were getting more and more mandates,” he said. “So many things changed with regard to state mandates and along with that the financial support that was needed wasn’t there. That really became a struggle as I moved through my superintendency.”
Still, Gretzinger noted, Kingston had a solid track record of passing budgets during his time in office.
“I feel very good about the number of budgets that passed the first time around, even though sometimes they were by a very close margin,” he said. “But I feel that they passed because the community knew that my goal was the children and their educational opportunities, and that’s what they wanted too. We wanted the same thing.”
Gretzinger said he was also pleased that many of the initiatives he spearheaded had come to fruition during his time as superintendent; including the closing of the high school campus, something he said was a concern from his earliest days in the district. Students had previously been allowed to leave campus for lunch and come back; now, that privilege is extended only to seniors with good academic and disciplinary records.
“I really saw that that was something that we needed to do in order to keep students in school, in order to help the retention rate, which I think we’ve made tremendous progress with in the past few years,” Gretzinger said. “And it really was a safety issue. There are, unfortunately, many things that were happening off-campus when kids were leaving school and not returning, and I think we have a very good control of that right now. It’s one of the things that took a while, but it was one of the major goals that I had and I’m very, very happy to have accomplished that goal and very proud.”
Library reborn, Montessori just born
The Carnegie Library, a long-dormant building on the Kingston High campus, was opened as the Carnegie Learning Center last year as an arts and technology hub, allowing for students to keep pace with the world. Also under Gretzinger’s leadership, the George Washington Elementary became a Montessori school, and while the district has noted that the program is still new, state assessment scores for its students have lagged behind other schools in Kingston. Gretzinger said that it was still too early to determine the validity of the Montessori program, especially based on standardized testing.
