Marion City Schools board selects Olympia Della Flora as next assistant superintendent

Following the resignation of former Marion City Schools Assistant Superintendent Jennifer Lawson, the board has hired Olympia Della Flora as the district's next assistant superintendent.

Della Flora, a Columbus native who was previously a teacher and principal with Columbus City Schools for many years and was most recently an associate superintendent with Stamford Public Schools in Stamford, Connecticut, grew up the daughter of an elementary school teacher.

She originally studied biology at The Ohio State University, but feeling called to education, she immediately went on to pursue her Master of Education also at Ohio State.

"I think I always wanted to be in education. My mother was actually a public school elementary teacher, so I didn’t necessarily want to follow her footsteps, but it’s just something that’s a passion of mine, and once I got into education felt like I was really in my element,” Della Flora said.

Through her experience teaching and working in different administrative positions, she has grown passionate about supporting principals, fostering family and community engagement and addressing student discipline holistically.

For these reasons, the board felt she would be the perfect fit for the job after months of Marion City Schools teachers and parents speaking up at board meetings to describe a "crisis of discipline" within the district.

At Columbus City Schools, where she worked from 2001 to 2018, she gained extensive experience working with student behaviors and setting up de-escalation rooms.

The board hopes this will translate to the district as Marion City Schools has been working to install a de-escalation room in each of its elementary buildings since Taft Elementary teachers stood at a board meeting to describe abuse from their students this past spring.

Della Flora said it is important to teach kids it is okay to take a break to reset their emotions in order to teach lifelong skills in managing their behaviors and stress.

“These are not skills they are not just going to need when they are in school. These are skills that are going to do people good, you know, when they become adults,” she said.

In January 2019, she gave a Ted Talk on "creative ways to get kids to thrive in school," where she addressed her experience working as principal with Columbus City Schools and how her building learned to proactively address adverse student behaviors.

Board President Kelly Mackay said that the decision to select Della Flora to serve as the next assistant superintendent was based upon listening to what was said at board meetings, needing to hire for the role after Lawson's resignation and restructuring the position to include a greater emphasis in working with curriculum and teaching and learning.

“I’m very excited that she is going to start with us. It sounds like she wants to go into the buildings and meet our teachers, meet our administrators, work with them, and she knows she has a lot of work ahead, but I think she’s up to it. We’re just very excited,” Mackay said.

Mackay also noted that though Marion City Schools is much smaller than Columbus City Schools, both districts face many similar challenges, making Della Flora's experience a great fit for addressing the needs in Marion.

Background in discipline and community engagement

In her most recent role as associate superintendent with Stamford Public Schools, Della Flora was able to engage with her passions of working with principals and furthering community engagement, skills she said have been largely responsible for much of her success as an educator.

She made the move from Columbus to Stamford, Connecticut to work for the district in 2018 after seeking opportunities to grow as an administrator and transition into a central office position.

“I saw the power of change that there was in when you can rally a community around a school,” she said.

However, due to a family tragedy during the COVID-19 pandemic, Della Flora decided she wanted to move back to Ohio to be closer to her family.

“For the pandemic for a lot of people, it refocused them and had you reprioritize certain things in life, and that was something that became important to me was to be closer to my family,” Della Flora explained.

It was then that she saw the open position for assistant superintendent in Marion and began learning of the challenges facing the district regarding discipline, thinking the opportunity could be a perfect fit for her passion and experience.

“I thought that maybe my skillset would be able to help that school district, and again, in my reset of priorities, I want to have purpose in the work that I do, so I felt that maybe I would have something to offer to Marion to help them in the crisis because some of the things that I heard were things that I heard as a principal,” she said.

Through her past experience, she said she learned that teachers are often not being best equipped to handle student behaviors, something she referred to as the result of a child "lacking a skill." She is passionate about helping teachers to learn strategies to teach behavioral skills.

“When we see a behavior out of a student, it is typically because they are lacking a skill, so I try to explain this by saying, ‘When children come to us, they don’t know how to read, or they don’t know how to solve a math problem.’ What do we do as educators? We come up with multiple strategies to help them put letters together to make words, right?” she said.

“When it comes to behavior, we typically don’t have those in our back pocket. In most of our teacher prep programs, we’re not really focusing on behaviors and social-emotional learning and those types of supports, so teachers are not necessarily coming in equipped with those."

Feeling prepared to enter a district in the midst of leadership transition, Della Flora said she has already met Interim Superintendent Steve Mazzi who was selected following the resignation of Superintendent Dr. Ron Iarussi.

Della Flora said she is excited to work with him and feels he has a lot of knowledge due to his previous superintendent experience.

She also said she wants their new leadership to be transparent with the community and serve as a listening ear to all members of the district, celebrating the successes of Marion City Schools while also working to fix the challenges.

“We welcome her with open arms,” Mackay said.

Story by: Sophia Veneziano (740) 564 - 5243 | sveneziano@gannett.com

This article originally appeared on Marion Star: Marion City Schools selects Della Flora as assistant superintendent