O’Toole resigns as Clintonville school superintendent, Tellock leaves board
By Erik Buchinger
Clintonville School District Superintendent Tom O’Toole resigned from his position during a closed session meeting on Monday, July 24.
According to his LinkedIn profile, O’Toole was the district’s superintendent since July 2001.
O’Toole was absent from the meeting during open session.
School Board Treasurer Clyde Tellock resigned during open session prior to the meeting’s break.
“I have an announcement,” Tellock said. “This will be my last meeting, so I’m going to excuse myself right now.”
“Thank you, Clyde, for your years of service,” School Board President Ben Huber said.
Teacher resignations/hires
Three teacher resignations were approved unanimously by the school board. Fourth grade teacher Mike O’Donnell, teaching/instructional coach Jody Peterson and middle school cross categorical teacher Alex Pahlow resigned from their positions, effective immediately.
“They were good employees of the district, and hopefully they will continue to help education wherever they go,” Huber said.
Brittany Huss was hired as the middle school cross categorical teacher.
Coaching hires
Clintonville unanimously approved Jim Ash and Jeff Brightwell to become co-head coaches. Both moved up from being assistant coaches.
Clintonville High School Principal Lance Bagstad said he is looking for more assistant coaches for the high school football team.
“We’ll see,” Bagstad said. “We haven’t had a lot of people chomping at the bit to coach football.”
Bagstad said Ash and Brightwell will be the co-head coaches for likely one season, so the school will have one year to find a coach for the following season.
“We moved on Jim and Jeff just because of where we were in the season,” Bagstad said. “We decided rather than looking at somebody from the outside coming in to just coach, we thought let’s keep it as smooth of a transition as possible.”
First-year Clintonville Middle School Associate Principal Tom Burkhalter was hired to become an assistant football coach for the high school team.
Rexford-Longfellow Elementary Associate Principal Scott Huff was hired to be the freshman football coach.
Elementary teacher Nick Firari was hired to take over as the head coach of the golf team, and Stacey Hohn will move up from the middle school cross country coach to become the high school cross country coach.