LOUDONVILLE — Catherine Puster, the outgoing superintendent of Loundonville-Perrysville Exempted Village Schools, tells people the district’s students are her “1,000 kids.”
Puster, who said she’s “not shy about emotion,” found herself physically and mentally exhausted from worrying about her “1,000 kids” during the pandemic.
“When you’ve got kids at home whose parents are struggling to make ends meet, they’re struggling to figure out how to put food on the table because, their service industry, their service staff has just been closed out, and they don’t have a way to put food on the table … I’ll tell you…that takes a toll on a person,” she said.
After the worst of the pandemic had passed, the district tackled the task of caring for its students’ mental and academic well-being in the wake of a global disruption to life and learning.
For example, the district’s seventh graders, who take classes at Loudonville High School, had the academic maturity of fifth graders after the pandemic, Puster said. It was up to the district to get them back on track.
“That’s tough for kids. And it’s tough for adults to try to get them there because you just can’t academically mature two years overnight. So that’s a struggle, there’s a lot of supports needed for our students to get there,” she said.
These COVID-related trials and tribulations were a major factor in Puster’s decision to recently resign as superintendent and seek a “fresh start” she said.
She initially announced her resignation via a letter she read at a school board meeting in November, but didn’t offer a specific reason why she had made that choice. The board voted 3-2 to approve her resignation, with members David Hunter and John Temple voting against it.
The vagueness of Puster’s resignation is what drove Hunter to vote against approving it, he said.
“Normally, when superintendents resign, they resign because they have another position lined up or they retire. And the letter didn’t indicate a position lined up, so her resigning just to resign sends a message to me that the board failed and the superintendent failed when we hired her six years ago,” he said.
Puster’s relationship with the school board seemed to falter in the past few years, according to copies of her performance evaluations reviewed by Ashland Source.
Just after she took the superintendent’s job in 2017, Puster received an overall score of 4.65 out of 5 on the board’s evaluation of her. But in her most recent evaluation, Puster received a score of 3.83, with her lowest marks on her relationship with the community.
“I do not believe there is sufficient communication to the Community from the Superintendent’s Office,” one comment on the evaluation stated.
“Catherine must work to effectively communicate with the district. As the monthly coffees were removed by COVID, some other method must be implemented. The district cannot rely on Bloomz (an app the district uses to communicate with the community) to convey all the goings on,” another comment said.
Had Puster not resigned, it was likely that the school board would not have renewed her contract later this month, board of education president John Carroll said.
Puster’s relationship with the board “had ups and downs” but they were united in doing what’s best for the district and the community, she said.
As for what she’ll do after her term ends next year on July 31, she does not have a new job lined up yet, but she’s looking to spend more time with her husband, Jeff Shelton of of the Ashland County Sheriff’s Department, she said.
