West Bend's Jill Ries will be Swallow School District's next superintendent

Alec Johnson, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
·2 min read
The Swallow School Board selected current West Bend School District Director of Curriculum and Instruction Jill Ries to be the district's next superintendent. She will start in her new role in early July.
The Swallow School Board selected current West Bend School District Director of Curriculum and Instruction Jill Ries to be the district's next superintendent. She will start in her new role in early July.

The K-8 Swallow School District has hired the West Bend School District's Jill Ries as its next superintendent, replacing Melissa Thompson, who submitted her resignation in February.

Ries, currently the director of curriculum and instruction in the West Bend School District, will take over in early July. Thompson's resignation is effective June 30.

Thompson is one of four Lake Country area school district superintendents to announce their departures this year. Arrowhead Union High School's Laura Myrah will retire from the district in August. Hartland-Lakeside's Nancy Nikolay will step down from the K-8 district at the end of the school year. And in the K-8 Stone Bank School District, Ryan Krohn is also leaving his post, to become superintendent in the K-12 Palmyra-Eagle School District.

Swallow School Board President Kevin Scott confirmed in a June 6 email that the board unanimously approved Ries' contract to serve as the district's superintendent for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years at a special meeting June 2.

Ries was one of three finalists for the position, along with Lewis Malczewski, academy principal of Gifford School in the Racine Unified School District, and Michele Schmidt, principal of the Hartland-Lakeside School District's North Shore Middle School, as well as that district's director of pupil services. They were among 18 candidates who applied for the position.

Ries has 30 years' experience in education, having served as an elementary and high school teacher, high school associate principal, elementary principal, curriculum administrator, director of performance and director of curriculum and instruction. She holds a doctorate from Cardinal Stritch University, according to her bio on the Swallow website.

The Swallow School District is in northwestern Waukesha County in the town of Merton. It feeds into the Arrowhead Union High School District and has an enrollment of 464, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction's enrollment database.

Contact Alec Johnson at (262) 875-9469 or alec.johnson@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @AlecJohnson12.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Swallow School Board hires Jill Ries as district's next superintendent