New superintendent eager to take his place in Warwick

Warwick — Frank Greenhall is a hands-on kind of guy. As he prepares to take the helm of the Warwick Valley Central School District, he is shuttling between his current district, Cambridge Central School District which is about an hour north and west of Albany, and his new home come February, right here in Warwick. He’s been to a Warwick football game. He loved the high school play. He’s attended school board meetings. He even came to the School Board’s work session this past Monday after putting in a full day in Cambridge. “It will be the exception when I’m not at an activity,” said Greenhall, 56, who plans to get to know most of the kids in his new district. And he is not daunted by the number of kids he will soon meet. “I look forward to it,” he said, noting that he worked in a large district when he was in Delaware. Greenhall comes to Warwick with 13 years of experience as a superintendent and a three-year contract that will pay him $170,000 per year. “There is an easiness about him,” said school board president Mike Meinhardt. “He is a good communicator. We (the board) have to reestablish a link with the community. He will definitely help with that.” Meinhardt said the district started its hunt for a new superintendent shortly after Dr. Joseph Natale announced his retirement earlier this year. Natale, who will step down at the end of January, has been at the helm here in Warwick for 17 years. Forty candidates applied for the job. A consultant narrowed that field down to 25, then seriously looked at 18 of them. After combing through the resumes, the number of candidates was then cut to eight, all of whom the board interviewed. Then the final three were chosen. Site visits were made and an additional interview scheduled. Greenhall was the board’s unanimous choice. “We wanted the best person — whether it is outside or inside the district,” said Meinhardt. “Our goal is to get back to a smaller, personal feeling. We have every hope to continue that. He (Greenhall) has that.” The district has started a smaller learning centers program in the high school, to go along with the smaller teams in the middle school. Greenhall seems to fit into that strategy — he even wrote his doctorate thesis on “Personalizing a Large School Environment.” Greenhall started out his career as a social studies teacher in a small, rural school district. He then went into teaching special education in suburban Delaware before becoming the associate principal in the largest high school in the state. He moved back to New York to become a high school principal in the Mechanicsville district. After three years, he was asked to step up to superintendent of his district, which he did for seven years. He moved to the larger Dansville, district as superintendent, then moved to Cambridge, first as a principal, then superintendent, a position he has held for more than five years. Greenhall is looking forward to moving to Warwick, for both personal as well as professional reasons. “My daughter lives in Connecticut and my wife’s family is on Long Island, so we’ll be closer here,” he said. He is also an avid pigeon racer and currently the president of the American Racing Pigeon Union with 10,000 members. “I’m looking forward to racing here against people in New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut,” said the New York City native. As excited as Meinhardt is about having Greenhall take over next year, Greenhall seems just as excited to get started. He knows there will be challenges in a district the size of Warwick, with over 4,000 students, but he doesn’t look at it as pressure. “Other jobs have pressure,” he said. “Firemen who run into burning buildings and save lives everyday have pressure. What we’re trying to do is make the lives of our school children better than they would have been without us.”