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Warren schools hire new chief
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Dr. Bruce Thomas
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Bruce Thomas, Warren’s new schools superintendent, who will earn $110,000 yearly under terms of a three-year contract, has spent most of his 31 years as an educator in urban parts of Northeast Ohio.
One major exception was this past year, when he served as superintendent of Marietta City Schools in rural southern Ohio. That was his first job as the head of a school district.
Starting Aug. 1 in Warren, Thomas will combine his interest in leadership with his experience in urban education.
At 54, Thomas is relatively young and energetic, as well as knowledgeable about city school districts, Warren Board of Education President Kevin Stringer said Thursday as the board made Thomas’ hiring official.
Stringer said Thomas has the educational qualifications to be superintendent, but he also has a “gentlemanly demeanor” and “empathy,” a quality honed over about 15 years as a school counselor and behavioral therapist.
Thomas has an ability to unite diverse groups of people and “will fit into the district and lead us to a new type of culture, a more inclusive culture,” Stringer said.
Ed Bolino, another board member, said the school district has spent a lot of time in recent years trying “to find the best way to educate kids,” but Thomas has the human-relations skills and the “ability to pull everybody together to make it happen.”
Thomas, who has a doctoral degree, said he’s leaving Marietta after only one year because his “skill set” wasn’t a very good match for Marietta.
Thomas was able to help “connect” the community and the schools and enabled the district to pass a levy.
“Beyond that skill set, there wasn’t much of a match,” Thomas said. “I was kind of limited there.”
“This district [Warren], I think, provides opportunities for me, and with my experience and expertise, I should have more impact on more kids,” Thomas said.
Thomas said connecting with the community will be one of his first jobs.
His contract in Warren begins Aug. 1, “but I’ll be here before then. I’m kind of out and about now,” he said.
The grief counseling the school district arranged at two Warren schools after three Warren students died in a house fire June 16 “reminded me that the connection between the community and the schools is almost imperative to the success of the schools,” Thomas said.
As for disciplinary policies, a topic that led to dissent in the Warren school district several years ago, Thomas said he believes schools need to be “safe and orderly, consistently.”
“But sometimes everybody’s circumstance is different, and there needs to be conversations about what happened,” he added.
Thomas, who owns a home in Solon, was an assistant superintendent for Cleveland schools one year before taking the job in Marietta.
For 19 years, Thomas worked in the South Euclid-Lyndhurst school district near Cleveland — in counseling, career intervention and alternative education. He also worked three years as school-improvement coordinator for the Ohio Department of Education.