TOWN OF HOUNSFIELD, New York (WWNY) – After 6 years as superintendent of Jefferson-Lewis BOCES, Superintendent Stephen Todd is retiring from education. Before that, he spent years as a teacher and later as the principal of Watertown High School. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m the luckiest man in the world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
We asked him what\u2019s the biggest challenge facing education.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaintaining consistent civility between people, and we see in our society that\u2019s not always the case now. And even in our wonderful North Country sometimes there\u2019s less civility in the way people are acting,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Technology in the classroom has been tightened up this year with no cell phones allowed in classrooms. The feedback to Todd has come from teachers and kids.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m hearing that from kids who are saying, \u2018You know, I wasn\u2019t looking forward to this but I\u2019ve got to say, it\u2019s leading to more conversations face to face between people,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Todd is leaving as enrollment with BOCES is up. While other schools in the North Country may see enrollment as a challenge, he says BOCES is fortunate to have more students.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe percentage of those students participating in a half day program in career and technical ed at one of our two tech centers has gone way up. We\u2019re looking at about 50% of all the eligible juniors and seniors. We\u2019re up by 46% over the course of the last five years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Even though Todd isn\u2019t going to be in the classrooms anymore, it doesn\u2019t completely mean he\u2019s going away.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy wife and daughter and I are staying right here in this community. I\u2019m going to stay engaged in this community. And we\u2019ll stay very active, so none of that is going to change. It\u2019s just going to be contributing in different ways,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Todd\u2019s final day comes at the end of the month. Chris DiFulvio will be taking Todd\u2019s place. He was the superintendent of Cazenovia Central School District near Syracuse.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2025 WWNY. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TOWN OF HOUNSFIELD, New York (WWNY) – After 6 years as superintendent of Jefferson-Lewis BOCES, Superintendent Stephen Todd…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8461,9,11,10,49,51,50,1577,8460],"class_list":["post-10327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-jefferson-lewis-boces","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-retirement","tag-stephen-todd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}