‘It truly is a seven day a week, 24 hour day job:’ Hamden Superintendent announces retirement
- Jessica Simms
- Feb 22, 2022
- 4 min read
After eight years of being the superintendent of Hamden Public Schools, Jody Goeler has announced his retirement.
Goeler originally considered retiring in January 2020 because at that time he reached 37 and a half years of being an educator in Connecticut. But once the pandemic hit in March, he decided to stay in his position.
“The last thing I could say at that time was, ‘Alright, I’ve gotten to 37 and a half years, I’m going to retire,’” Goeler said. “So I made a commitment to myself basically to say that I’m going to work through the pandemic and retire at some point, but I wanted to really lead the district through this.”
Even though COVID is still present, Goeler feels as if the district is better prepared to handle the pandemic, so now is the right time for him to step down.
“I also think after two years of being in the pandemic the district has the tools, the resiliency, the ability to really ride whatever waves are thrown at it and I just felt at this point it was a good time for me to finally make that announcement and agreed to stay on while the board goes through the process of determining who its next superintendent is going to be,” Goeler said.
The Search Process
The Hamden Board of Education has committed Goeler to stay on until June 30, but he will stay on as late as December 2022. It’s based on where the board is on finding the next superintendent.
“He will be with us at least another six months to see out the rest of the school year and to support us with our various initiatives that we have going on right now, but also to help give a sense of continuity before we transition into a new leadership role,” said Melissa Kaplan, chair of the Hamden Board of Education.
Kaplan said that the goal is to have a new superintendent ready for the beginning of the next school year, but Goeler has offered to sign an additional contract if there is trouble finding someone for that deadline.
The process to find a new superintendent is long, Kaplan said, and the board has just started.
“First things first, we had to create a new contract for (Goeler) and we also then named all the members of the board of education to be on the hiring committee and there’s nine of us so it is a sizable group of us,” Kaplan said. “We are representative of the various political parties in the town.”
Right now, the hiring committee is currently looking for a consulting firm to help with the search process.
“So there are special firms that will go and help us navigate doing a national search and we want to make sure that we’re very thorough in finding the very best superintendent for our schools,” Kaplan said. “We also have very talented and experienced leadership within the school systems. We have amazing administrators that I think would also be extremely qualified candidates for the position, but I think it is important to really kind of see what’s out there.”
Along with the consulting committee, Kaplan said it is “very crucial that we have community input and involvement as much as possible.” So the board is creating focus groups.
“Focus groups would include teachers, absolutely, and students, community members from the different schools in our community, PTAs and really anybody who wants to have a voice should have a platform to guide the board of ed through this process,” Kaplan said.
Goeler as a leader
As superintendent, Goeler said he enjoyed serving the families in the Hamden Public School district, but it was difficult to be able to hear all of the voices in the community. One time that Goeler noticed this challenge was during the height of the pandemic.
“There were many different points of view as to how we should proceed with the pandemic and the actions we should take to keep everybody safe,” Goeler said. “... It’s always challenging to hear the voices and respond to all the voices. I think the way around that is to ensure that the people who are helping to make the decisions are the ones closest to and have the expertise to help with that decision making.”
Even though Goeler said it can be hard to be able to listen to everyone’s wants, needs and concerns, Kaplan said that she has noticed he prioritizes supporting everyone in the community.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Goeler increased the mental health support for students, made sure all of the students had access to a computer, WiFi and all students had free breakfast and lunch.
“You can’t learn on an empty stomach,” Kaplan said. “To me, that is who Jody is. Taking care of the entire student. Because you can have the most amazing curriculum, but if you are starving, how are you going to retain any information?”
Chris Melillo, assistant superintendent, has worked with Goeler since he started as the superintendent. He said working with Goeler for eight years, through a pandemic, has taught him that no one has all the answers.
“When we fell into the pandemic, there wasn’t a book that you could pull off the shelf and say, ‘How do you lead a school system through a pandemic?’ That didn’t exist,” Melillo said. “But we worked together to find answers to very difficult questions. No one really had that knowledge base. Obviously we’re not epidemiologists, but he was able to certainly get the right answers for our community and move us forward.”
As superintendent, Goeler learned quickly that the job is truly a full time job. He would sometimes wake up to 30 plus notifications on his phone about issues that he had to deal with right away.
“It taxes families, it taxes friendships, it taxes lifestyle, it just goes with the job,” Goeler said.
Even during those long hours, Melillo said that Goeler made the late nights spent together enjoyable.
“Just working long hours together and working late at night and he’ll crack a joke and just make me laugh,” Melillo said. “Sometimes that’s all you need.”
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