For Steve Paramore, who was recently selected as the Ashland City Schools Superintendent, continuing to build connections with Ashland University is one of his priorities.
Paramore, who received his undergraduate degree from Florida Southern University, earned two graduate degrees from AU, with a master’s in Curriculum and Instruction in 2009 and an Educational Administration master’s in 2014. Paramore later received his superintendent’s license through AU in 2017.
After Paramore graduated from FSU in 2003, he became the AU women’s golf coach until midway through 2004.
At this point, he resigned as the AU women’s golf coach and became the girls’ golf coach at Ashland High School, where he was substitute teaching.
“When you are teaching at a public school, it gets to be a little bit difficult to take days off to coach golf because they might be Thursday, Friday, [and] Saturday tournaments, and you only get so many personal days as a public school teacher, and you certainly can’t use sick days,” said Paramore.
The benefit of being able to do the bachelor’s program at AU early on helped Paramore get his license to become an elementary school physical education teacher, which is what he did for 12 years at Ashland City Schools. During that time, he coached both the boys and girls golf teams for Ashland City Schools.
Then, in 2014, Paramore became the assistant principal to Matt White at Ashland Middle School; he resigned as golf coach.
“When you go into administration, you’ve got to be at a place where you’re OK without coaching anymore,” Paramore said. “Not that you’re not coaching teachers and students every day, but you’ve got to be able to relinquish that in a bigger district. If I was maybe in a smaller district, I could probably be an administrator and coach, but I really wanted to focus on becoming a leader of an entire building.”
Being connected to the Ashland community as an alum and native, Paramore wanted to continue his time here, and in 2020, he became the assistant superintendent under Doug Marrah.
During that time, Paramore was mainly focused on Human Resources and Operations over the next three years.
“My leadership really was tested during COVID, and I think that Ashland City Schools, myself, the administration, administrative team, and the community all kind of banded together,” said Paramore. “It took us to the end, we were gonna do everything we could to continue to offer high-level education, provide services like meals, and support families.”
This was when his passion to become superintendent of Ashland City Schools started.
Paramore mentioned that Ashland City Schools has always received student teachers from Ashland University, but he wanted to make more of a pipeline from Ashland City Schools to AU.
In his time being superintendent, Paramore has focused on creating a program called “Talon Tracks,” a self-proclaimed idea that he came up with, along with Bob Archer, Dr. Carlos Campo, and Keith Ramsdell, AU’s vice president for enrollment management and marketing,.
Talon Tracks is a partnership program with AU to partner with multiple area high schools.
It includes everything from AU faculty guest teaching courses, College Credit Program (CCP) courses being taught on-site, to tuition scholarships and college prep programming.
“My goal is to get more kids from Ashland to go to Ashland University. I know enrollment is a big issue, right now they’re trying everything they can to increase enrollment, because if you increase enrollment that increases revenue, so I’m going to do everything that I can to promote Ashland University at Ashland High School,” said Paramore.
Ramsdell said, “Mr. Paramore is a huge proponent of all things Ashland, but especially the partnership between Ashland City Schools and Ashland University. We’re looking forward to collaborating with him as we continue to move the Talon Tracks initiative forward to encourage more Arrows to become Eagles.”
Paramore wants to open the eyes of Ashland High School students to AU, and dramatically appreciates AU for what they do for the community, students, staff, and faculty, and hopes to continue to have a good partnership with the university.
“We’re going to do everything we can to help build Ashland University up to what it would like to be, obviously we’re both kind of going the same direction, we’re constantly preparing for the future,” he said. ”We hope in turn that they continue to see great things from us and say great things about us and that trust continues to be there.”
Paramore also wants to continue to innovate in the city school district.
“We had to do a lot of innovation with creating program software because we didn’t know if we were gonna be able to get back in the buildings, the face of education was changing, and now even with artificial intelligence coming, I want to make sure that we stay on the cutting edge of innovation.”
Paramore’s biggest goal at Ashland City Schools is to make sure they’re not only keeping good people at Ashland but making sure Ashland City Schools is desirable to work for and compete in the job market.
“I really want to be a magnet for good people looking to serve not only students and families, but I want them to raise their family here in Ashland, and we want to provide them with a great service,” said Paramore.
