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Sherman Superintendent Accepts New Position

Sherman Central School will soon be in need of a new superintendent.

“This is a chance to move back home,” Michael Ginestre said of becoming superintendent of the Sweet Home Central School District.. “I grew up in the district next to Sweet Home. My entire family is up there. It’s really a chance to work at a great district with a great reputation, but also to be very close to family.”

He said he will miss “everything” about the Sherman Central School District, but what he’ll miss most is the people.

“The people I work with are phenomenal,” he said.

“We have great students that love coming to school in Sherman. I think it’s the people at Sherman that make them love to come to school. The admin team is so laser-focused on student achievement in, and out, of the classroom.”

“The personal sacrifices teachers make every day to make sure students succeed at Sherman is unlike anywhere I’ve ever been,” Ginestre continued. “I hope to bring that type of culture with me to Sweet Home.”

Among his accomplishments are the Clymer-Sherman-Panama sports merger as well as the school’s collaboration with Harvard University to study chronic absenteeism and college and career readiness. Through a National Center for Rural Education Research Networks grant, Sherman was one of the 30 rural schools in New York chosen to collaborate with the Ivy League school. Through data compilation and review, Sherman develops intervention methods with Harvard’s continuous improvement model to address chronic absenteeism and college and career readiness.

“I’m happy to say we’ve made great strides with chronic absenteeism, even during the pandemic,” Ginestre said. “I’m very proud of the results that we’ve had. I’ll miss doing that work.”

As a superintendent during the pandemic, Ginestre has had to figure out ways to provide quality education to students. The biggest issue he ran into was the size of the building.

“It just wasn’t big enough to house each and every student, every single day for five weeks,” he said. “We utilized every space in the building, and we still had to have our 9 through 12 students do live online learning four days a week.”

Ginestre said the school board is in the process of handling the vacancy left by him.

“I talked to the board Monday night,” he said. “They are deciding right now how the transition will work. In the next week or so, they will make a decision about what the next steps are to fill the vacancy.”

He starts his new position in early August.

Ginestre worked as a social studies teacher at Falconer for five years before becoming the principal at Sherman. Following that, he became the Sherman superintendent in 2016.

He received a master’s degree in educational leadership at St. John Fisher College, as well as a master’s in secondary education, with a social studies concentration from Niagara University.

Ginestre said a short-term teaching gig is what drew him to the field of education.

“I graduated from Fisher with a bachelor’s in communication journalism in 1994,” he said. “I started my career in public relations and marketing. I did that for 10 years. While doing that, I got a call from an old professor of mine at Fisher, who asked me to teach a class there. I stood in front of my class that first day and thought, ‘This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to be in education for the rest of my life.'”

“When 9-11 hit, I thought it was a good time to get into education and follow my dream,” Ginestre continued. “I wanted to be a teacher, I wanted to coach. I had the business background, too, so administration was kind of a route I was looking into.”

Ginestre was teaching part-time at Fisher when the school offered him a full-time position. He said he would do it, but with a stipulation: allow him to get a master’s in educational leadership.

The school allowed him to do so, and after teaching full-time at the college for two years and receiving his Master’s, he resigned from the position. He canvassed the state and found the social studies position at Falconer Central School District.

“It was an awesome five years there,” Ginestre said. “I was the head football coach for three of them, head girls basketball coach for four years — they were just wonderful to me at Falconer.”

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