ERP INSTITUTE PARTICIPANT

Dr. Richard (Rick) Damelio is a native of the Boston, Massachusetts’s area and attended public schools, kindergarten through 12th grade in the Boston area.  He is a 1965 graduate of Salem State University, received his master’s degree in School Administration from Keene State College, Keene, NH in 1969.  In 1989, he graduated from the University of San Francisco with a doctorate in School Leadership.

 

After graduation from Salem State University, Rick began his educational career as a classroom teacher for four years and then became a school principal.   For the next 15 years, he was an elementary, middle school and high school principal on both the East and West Coast.       

 

He and his wife, Donna, and two children moved to San Mateo, CA in 1977 where he was a middle school principal for 5 years then became Assistant Superintendent for Educational Services. In 1989 Rick was selected to be the Superintendent of Schools and served the San Mateo City School District in that capacity for 12 years.

 

In 2001, he joined the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC) as Director of School Reform. In this role, he worked with school district superintendents and school principals on the district wide reform efforts and helped guide the work of school districts desiring to make system wide educational changes.

 

In 2005, Rick was selected by Jack O’Connell then State Superintendent of Public Instruction to be the State Administrator for Vallejo City Unified School District.   The bankrupt school district had been taken over by the state in 2005.  While at Vallejo City Unified, Rick and his team were able to return the district to solvency and instituted numerous changes at the elementary and secondary level that significantly improved student achievement, reduced the dropout rate by almost 100%, and improved overall school climate. At the high school level, Rick closed a high school and worked with teachers and principals to successfully implement the a to g course of study, established freshman houses on each campus and implemented a career academies program for juniors and seniors. In June of 2013, the State Superintendent returned governance to the Vallejo Board of Education. In 2013 Rick retired and now works part time coaching administrators and consulting in variety of areas such as:

 

Curriculum Alignment

School Reform                                               

Budget Development & Management

Employee Negotiations          

District Wide Reform                   

Executive coaching