By Bill Petzold
Editor
CARO — Caro Community Schools students will begin the 2014-15 school year with a new superintendent, a new high school principal and the beginnings of what Mike Joslyn hopes is a new direction for Caro Schools.
The Caro Board of Education voted unanimously June 9 to hire Steve Clark as high school principal. Clark takes the job formerly held by Joslyn, hired as superintendent to replace retiring administrator Bruce Nelson. Nelson started with the Caro district in September 2010.
Joslyn said he knew Clark and his wife, JoLynn Clark, principal of Frankenmuth High School, from meetings for the Tri-Valley Conference high school athletic conference. Clark comes to Caro from Chesaning High School, and he and his wife live in Frankenmuth.
“I’m really excited to be here,” Clark said. “It’s a really neat opportunity. Like Mike said, we’ve known each other for a few years through the TVC, and I’ve always thought that we thought similarly, educationally, and I’m really excited to be able to work with him and for the community of Caro. It’s always been a positive experience, so I was really excited when there was an opportunity here.”
Clark appears to have impressed the school board. Joslyn presented Clark to the board with his recommendation to hire him during the June school board meeting, and the board hired him without further inquiry.
“That was great,” Clark said of the board’s unanimous decision. “It was really nice to see a board that was unified on pretty much everything, so I’m excited to be able to work with them as well. There were a lot of good questions coming from the board (during the interview process).”
“When we looked at the candidates that we looked at, Steve and his experience made it an easy selection because you want him to own that job,” Joslyn said. “It’s been tough the past week or so as we’ve started to make the tradition. We’re both kind of ‘working for free,’ so to speak. I’m supposed to be finishing up as the principal, and Steve’s been willing to come in, and it’s nice there because I can start to go down and do things at the Central Office. There are a few things I obviously have to finish up, but it makes it nice during that transition knowing there’s someone who’s a veteran and knows what to do.
“He’s new to the area, so he said he’s going to have lots of questions, but at the same given point, I’ll have lots of questions and to me it’s one of those things where Chesaning’s been through a bond, and that’s one of those things I’m looking forward to doing with our district. I’ll have just as many questions for him, so I think that’s going to be a great fit for us.”
Clark grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, went to a high school in a suburb there and earned his degrees at Central Michigan University and Saginaw Valley State University.
“I look at it — and my wife looks at it the same way — that we have 540 kids in each of our buildings,” Clark said. “They’re our kids and we treat them that way. I love my students, and when it comes to discipline I treat it like I’m their parent. ‘You’re not going to like it, but I’m going to have to teach you a lesson. I can’t have you making the same mistakes or think that it’s OK.’ More often it’s about being that caring individual who wants to see them be successful in everything they do and doing everything we can to put them in the position to be successful.”
Clark and Joslyn are both 38 years old. Joslyn graduated with Caro High School’s Class of 1994 before attending Alma College where he played football and earned his undergraduate degree. He holds a Master’s Degree from Central Michigan University. Joslyn was Caro High’s principal for the past seven years, and prior to that was principal at Vestaburg High School for three years and a teacher at Merrill for five years. He and his wife Michelle have three children, Isaac, age 12, Emma, 9, and Luke, 6, all of whom attend Caro Schools.
“We’re producing great people,” Joslyn said. “We might not have an astronaut or an Olympic gold medalist or anything to that end, but you walk around town and you can wave to someone you graduated with. It’s a wonderful community, and that’s why I came back here. I’m raising my kids in a wonderful community. My parents never locked their doors, and still don’t.
“We’re producing hope in kids and we’re generating a lot of good things. The kid that is the first graduate in his family or the kid tat’s the 10th graduate in his family – we’re putting them in a position to be successful in life. That’s the ultimate thing fro schools to do; we’re a platform for that.”
Joslyn said he wants to focus on improving the collaboration between Caro’s various school buildings and between the school and community. He spoke about the possiblity of bringing forward a bond issue for school improvements and the challenge of creating a welcoming environment while implementing heightened security in the face of recent events at schools around the country. The key, he says, is proving to the community that their school district is worth investing in.
“Ultimately what I really want to push is we as a school investing back into the community just like I want the community to invest in us,” Joslyn said. “You’ve seen that I’ve been out volunteering and into many things, and that’s what I was taught growing up here. My parents were involved in lots of civic organizations and that’s the thing: You just have to do those things. … My mom was a school employee and my dad was a judge, and they still went out and volunteered in the community, and I want that crossing of paths (with community members), and so we have to invest in each other.
“We’re trying really as a school district to … prove to the community that we’re an investment-worthy organization. I think we’ve lost touch of that a little bit, and I think it’s a security measure, that’s the tough thing. … We want to invite the community in but we have all of our doors locked, so you have to walk through (security measures). People are getting accustomed to that. But at the same given point we want evening activities; I want people in these buildings.”