Amy Sutton settles into her new office at J.B. Stephens Elementary School office in Greenfield. Sutton was promoted to principal at the school after serving the past five years as assistant principal at Greenfield Intermediate School.
GREENFIELD — Greenfield-Central administrators headed back to the schools this week to prepare for the Aug. 2 start of the new school year, and a few new faces are in the mix.
Amy Sutton has taken over as principal at J.B. Stephens Elementary School after serving the past five years as assistant principal at Greenfield Intermediate School.
Greenfield-Central Junior High School also has two new administrators this year. Jeff Cleveland took over as the new assistant principal while Mark Evans has taken on the combined role of dean of students and athletic director.
Evans will also take on the transition coordinator duties previously held by Matt Davis, who has left to teach Title 1 classes at Greenfield Intermediate School this year.
The new posts, in addition to several teaching changes, were approved at the school board’s June and July meetings this summer.
The school district is still searching for a new counselor and director of counseling to fill openings at Greenfield-Central High School.
Former counselors Matt Renfroe and Kim Kile both resigned this summer. Kile, who served as director of counseling since 2011, took early retirement to spend more time with family and to pursue other goals.
Superintendent Harold Olin said the school board plans to hire replacements as soon as possible and said students and parents should not experience a lack of service as the new school year gets underway.
While Olin said he’s sorry to see a number of fine staff members go this year, he’s excited about the quality of incoming employees.
Sutton, the new principal at J.B. Stephens Elementary School, is no stranger to Greenfield-Central schools.
“Amy has been with us the last five years, and she was an assistant principal in Lebanon before that,” said Olin. “We know her strengths well through what she’s done at GIS the past several years. She’s loved by her students, her staff and parents,” he said.
Cleveland, the new assistant principal at the junior high school and a 10-year Greenfield resident, has been a longtime staff member at Warren Township schools, mostly recently as a middle school assistant principal.
He replaces Jeff Sincoft, who left to take a job in Evansville.
Evans — Cleveland’s new dean of students — is also a transplant from Warren Township schools, having most recently served as assistant principal at an elementary school.
On Monday, both men said they were happy to be joining such a supportive school system like Greenfield-Central.
“Everyone has been so welcoming and supportive, which has been great,” said Cleveland, as he settled into his new office on Monday.
“I love the family feel in this school system. It doesn’t matter who you are, you can tell that everyone works together to provide students with the best education we can.”
Evans echoed those sentiments.
“I’m excited to be here. There’s a real community feel,” said Evans, who lives on the southside of Indianapolis, but has frequently visited family in Greenfield over the years.
Through his transition coordinator role, he’s looking forward to helping students transition from one school to the next, whether it’s incoming seventh graders or outgoing eighth graders on their way to high school.
“I’ll be working with principals at both the middle school and the high school to make sure that transition goes as smoothly as possible so students don’t get lost along the way,” he said.
Both Cleveland and Evans said they’re looking forward to working with Jim Bever, a longtime Greenfield-Central employee who took the lead position at the school at the start of the 2021-22 school year.
Just as the district’s new administrators are starting a new chapter with Greenfield-Central schools, another is saying goodbye after a number of decades spent with the corporation.
Kile, 55, retired as the high school’s counseling director just a year shy of the quarter-century mark.
The mother of four started working at Greenfield-Central schools in 1998 when her children were young, after working as director of admissions at Butler University.
She started out as a guidance counselor at Greenfield-Central’s middle school before moving to the high school in 2010 when the longtime director of counseling, Kathy Dowling, retired.
Kile considers herself to be a lifelong learner, which is what prompted her to earn her license in mental health counseling certification during the height of the COVID pandemic.
She’s now pursuing a doctorate degree in American Studies through IUPUI, where she’s learning about bibliotherapy, the practice of using books and media to counsel children.
“It’s about using books and media to help kids work through some pretty rough issues in their lives,” said Kile.
“You use characters in books and movies to help them identify with that character, and then talk through how that character dealt with what they were going through and how they dealing with it in their life.”
While she doesn’t yet know how she’ll put her bibliotherapy studies into practice, Kile said she looks forward to working with students again one day soon.
“For me it’s about being able to combine my love of literature with what I’ve been doing for 24 years, which is working with kids and doing counseling. So I’m now working on putting it all together,” she said.
As she embarks on the next chapter, Kile said she’s loved every moment of her time with Greenfield schools.
“There was nothing about the job that told me it was time to go. It was more about me and my personal bucket list and personal plans that prompted me to retire,” she said, including the recent birth of her grandson.
“My staff had always asked me, ‘When do you plan to retire?’ And I said, ‘When my work gets in the way of my life.’ And so with a new grandson and some other things happening in my life, it just felt like this was the right time,” she said.
