Longtime Newberg School District Superintendent Paula Radich gave notice of her retirement Tuesday night during the Newberg School District board of directors’ first meeting of the year. Like everything else about her, it was done quietly and efficiently, through a simple line item added to the consent agenda.

Radich will retire at the end of the school year, for reasons she declined to identify.
An intensely private person, Radich, who normally works Sunday through Friday, was hired in 1999. She will leave behind a district that has grown substantially in 13 years and successfully passed a $27.1 million bond last May.

“It’s hard for me to look back and see that 13 years have gone by,” she said.

Radich started her career in education after graduating from Marylhurst College, now a university, in 1969. She remembers those first few years on the job as a heady time, as she taught at Cathedral School, a private Catholic school associated with St. Mary’s Cathedral in Northwest Portland. Applying the research of John Goodlad and trademarks of the British primary school system, Radich was part of a teaching team. “I taught with some really phenomenal educators,” she said.

Her first foray into education actually predates her first teaching job by quite some years. The second eldest of nine children, she taught her younger siblings how to read in the basement of their Astoria home before they headed to school. “My suspicion is that they learned to read in spite of me and not because of me,” she quipped.

Neither of her parents completed a college education but, she said, they certainly saw the value of education and sacrificed so that their children could go on in higher education.

By her mid-20s she was an elementary principal in a Lincoln City public school. Her students were less diverse than those at Cathedral School and there were a lot of low-income, struggling families. Since then she has remained on the administrative side of public schools, but Radich said she feels she never stopped teaching. “As an administrator you are still a teacher,” she said. “You’re coaching teachers to become better teachers. To this day I hope I still teach, to some degree.”

In the early 1980s, she moved to the Kelso (Wash.) School District, where she eventually became an assistant superintendent. She applied to numerous superintendent jobs and was accepted for several before she took the job in Newberg. Radich found that Newberg, because of its size and location, would be a better fit for her than the others.
“I was comfortable with the size of the district,” she said, and the socioeconomic makeup of the student body was similar to what she had known in Washington. The job also brought her closer to her family in Portland.

In 2010, she was named Oregon Superintendent of the Year.

While Radich took a prolonged medical leave of absence last summer, she declined to comment on whether this affected her decision to retire.

“People retire every day,” she said, without delving any deeper in her reasons.

School board chairwoman Melinda Van Bossuyt said the school board is drafting a request for quotes for recruiting services and expects to select a consultant in the near future. She added that a successor is expected to be named by June 30, Radich’s last day.

“It’s going to be hard to be without her,” Van Bossuyt said of Radich’s departure. “She’s been really well-suited to our community.”
Van Bossuyt said that some of the criteria for the consultant will be to engage the community in determining the profile of the successful candidate.

Radich said she expects her successor will face the same challenges as all superintendents across the state in trying to move every student forward despite dwindling revenues.

She has made few plans as of yet for her retirement. “I will always be an advocate for public schools, but what role I will play I don’t know,” she said.

The board of directors will meet at 6 p.m. Tuesday for a special meeting.

Their will be only one item on the agenda as the board will issue a request for quotes from firms that specialize in executive and superintendent search firms.

Melinda Van Bossuyt said the board wanted to move quickly to start the search for a replacement. Van Bossuyt intends to have a new superintendent named by June 30 when Radich leaves.

Story by Laurent Bonczijk, Newberg Graphic