The Rondout Valley Central School District Board of Education appointed Gregory Kulp as the District’s new Director of Facilities during a meeting on Dec.15.
Kulp, who assumed his new position on Dec. 29, comes to Rondout Valley from Local Union 373 Plumbers & Steamfitters, where he served as a Journeyman Pipefitter.
Kulp has seven years of experience at Local Union 373 and has experience with installation and maintenance, blueprints and specifications, hand and power tools, plumbing,
constructing, pipefitting, and more.
Kulp is a returning Gander, having graduated from Rondout Valley High School in 2010. He holds a Certification of Completion from the Ulster BOCES Career and Technical Center’s CISCO Computer Repair and Networking program, as well a Certificate of Completion from the Ulster BOCES Adult Career Education Center’s Heating, Air, Conditioning, and Refrigeration Installation and Repair course.
He is a certified Plumber and Steamfitter and Refrigeration Technician Type 2 and 3, and has a certification in OSHA 30.
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Peter Manning joined The Catskill Mountain Club as Executive Director on Dec. 1.
Manning is well known in the Catskills for his work on the many pressing issues that face the Catskill Park and region, an announcement about the appointment said.
He is an experienced regional planner and an organizer of projects that align with the group.
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Marist College announced the appointment of Dr. Catherine (Katie) Gunther Kodat as Provost and Dean of Faculty.
Kodat joins Marist from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, where she also served as Provost and Dean of Faculty for five years, overseeing academic affairs, a conservatory of music, a residential liberal arts college, and all full-time faculty. Her selection follows an extensive national search that drew an extremely broad, talented pool of candidates.
Kodat will report to Marist President Kevin Weinman and serve as a member of both the President’s Advisory Council and Cabinet. As Provost and Dean of Faculty, Kodat will serve as Marist’s chief academic officer and lead the vision and strategy for an academic portfolio that includes innovative curriculum, high-impact practices, and valuable experiential learning opportunities both in and out of the classroom. She also will lead Marist’s faculty and student academic affairs teams to drive appropriate academic support and alignment to the College’s strategic plan.
Kodat previously spent 17 years on the faculty at Hamilton College, rising to the rank of professor of English and American Studies and later chairing the English and Creative Writing Department. Kodat gained international experience with appointments at the University of Oxford’s Linacre College and as a Fulbright Lecturer at EÖtvÖs Loránd Tudományegyetem in Budapest, Hungary, one of the country’s largest and most prestigious public research universities.
At both Lawrence University and Lewis & Clark College, where she served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Kodat led efforts to refine hiring guidelines for faculty searches that produced more diverse applicant pools and ultimately the hiring of more faculty of color. She also helped adopt more inclusive trainings and universal design for learning in courses in the humanities, the humanistic social sciences, and natural sciences.
Before entering higher education, Kodat was a reporter at The Baltimore Sun, covering housing, community development, policing, and LGBTQ+ rights.
Kodat earned a B.A. in English at the University of Baltimore and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English at Boston University. She will officially assume the role of Provost and Dean of Faculty at Marist College on May 1.
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The Catskill Central School District Board of Education selected Melissa A. Barrow to be its next superintendent of schools, effective February 12. Barrow was appointed by the Board at its meeting on Jan. 11.
Barrow comes to Catskill from the East Ramapo Central School District in Rockland County, where she has served since 2013 first as an instructional supervisor, then director, and was promoted to assistant superintendent of student programs, assessment, and evaluation. In this role, she led a team of 140 teachers, two directors and five central office staff who focus on the education and socio-emotional needs of over 5,000 multilingual learners. Within the last five years, Barrow has increased the graduation rate of English language learners by 26 percentage points and recently established a High School Newcomer Academy to support newly arrived students as they transition to high school.
She also served as an instructional supervisor for the Hudson Valley Regional Bilingual Education Resource Network at New Paltz and began her teaching career in the Middletown City School District as a teacher of English to speakers of other languages.
She has a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Black and Puerto Rican Studies from CUNY Hunter College, and a master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from SUNY New Paltz. She is bilingual and biliterate in English and Spanish.
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