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Cappuzzello selected for schools job
Board also hires new treasurer
AUSTINTOWN
Austintown Local Schools’ next superintendent is David Cappuzzello, who has served as superintendent of Girard City Schools since August 2011.
Austintown school board members selected Cappuzzello from a pool of 17 applicants and approved his five-year contract at $135,000 a year during a Tuesday afternoon meeting at the middle school.
Board President Don Sherwood said Cappuzzello’s 31 years of public school experience – which is divided between the classroom, the principal’s office and the boardroom – “blew away” other candidates for the district’s top job.
“He’s been through it all,” he said. “Everything we threw at him, he had a logical solution and he’d seen it before.”
Cappuzzello is a 1984 Chaney High School graduate who attended the University of Akron on a baseball scholarship.
After graduation, he spent 11 years teaching in Lake-view School District in Cort-land before serving as principal or assistant principal at Ravenna’s Southeast Middle School and Columbiana Exempted Village School District. He began leading the Girard district in 2011.
During that time, he always “revered” Austintown Local Schools, he said Tuesday.
“You came here and you didn’t leave. This really was the place,” Cappuzzello said.
He said he’ll first target the district’s five-year forecast and stabilize finances, then take aim at the district’s open-enrollment policy.
“We have to understand what the people want from open enrollment. We [have to] understand where the numbers should be,” Cappuzzello said.
Last year, district Treasurer Ryan Ghizzoni anticipated a decline in open enrollment in his five-year forecast, with related slumps in revenue and increased expenses through 2023.
Under Cappuzzello in 2012, Girard City Schools officials opted to expand open-enrollment availability to counter a flight of students leaving for other open-enrollment districts, according to Vindicator archives.
The Girard Board of Education plans to accept Cappuzzello’s resignation and appoint a new superintendent during a Thursday meeting.
The Vindicator on Tuesday afternoon requested a list of applicants for the Girard superintendent position but did not receive it.
Longtime Girard High School Principal William Ryser and William Christofil, high school assistant principal, also resigned last month.
Former Austintown superintendent Vincent Colaluca retired May 31 after 10 years heading the district.
Colaluca’s separation agreement with the board, obtained Tuesday by The Vindicator, includes clauses prohibiting Colaluca and the board from making disparaging comments about each other and requiring the board to provide Colaluca a “neutral” job reference – offering only his dates of employment, positions held and ending salary – as well as a clause that keeps Colaluca from filing complaints or lawsuits against the board.
Under the agreement, Colaluca will receive his remaining $120,814 annual salary as well as unused and accrued vacation time and personal and sick days through the 2019-20 school year.
The Austintown board also officially hired Blaise Karlovic, a 21-year school financier, as district treasurer. He will replace Ghizzoni, who is set to step down at the end of the month. The board set Karlovic’s five-year contract at $125,000 a year.
Vindicator reporter Samantha Phillips contributed to this report.