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Mostly Cloudy Two longtime principals are retiring
Schoen, Gelbwasser had four decades in district
At the end of the school year, Ronald Schoen and Rhonda Gelbwasser — two of Oceanside’s longtime principals — will be retiring, taking with them a combined 39 years of administrative experience.
Schoen, 58, joined the district in 1984, after teaching in the Long Beach School District for seven years. He spent one year as an administrative intern before being appointed principal of School 8 by then Superintendent Vic Leccese in 1985.
“When I first came here, I was in my very, very early 30s, and many of my staff members were the age of my own parents,” Schoen said. “So that was a challenge in itself — to try to convince people to hear me and to work collaboratively with me. And it took a while, but I think we created a really nice community.”
Although he is leaving the school district, Schoen is not leaving the work force. He plans to work with new administrators, sharing his experience and skills with them.
“I’ve already mentored administrators in Oceanside in the last couple of years, and that’s been very successful,” he said. “So I’ve kind of used the last couple of years to overlap and transition to a new life.”
As principal of School 8 for 26 years, Schoen has seen the school change, mainly through technology. “In the early 1990s, we were the first school to receive a New York State IBM grant to put computers into the classrooms,” he recalled, “and then things just exploded after that.”
Schoen has also seen much of the staff change: He estimates that nearly all of the staff members in the building are people he hired. He said he has encouraged his staff to lead new initiatives that the district has developed. “They’ve really been in the forefront in many different areas,” he said, “and I’m really proud of them.”
What Schoen said he would miss most is actually the minutia of his job. “Someone once told me that when you’re a principal, you probably switch doing things every 34 seconds,” he said. “The frenetic nature of the job — I’m going to miss that, actually.” He also said he would miss the camaraderie with his staff.
“But mostly just being down and dirty with the kids: sitting with them, tying their shoes, hearing their stories,” he said. “I’m going to definitely miss that.”
