LITCHFIELD – Creativity is a recurring theme in an hour-long conversation with Region 20 School Superintendent Chris Leone last week.
“We just can’t keep doing things that don’t work over and over,” he says.
Growing evidence of Leone’s urge to make creative improvements in the system begins at the front door of the new central office – a white house halfway up the hill leading to Wamogo High School, formerly housing the school’s groundskeeper.
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Leone and his staff renovated much of its interior, creating a homy feel complete with a kitchen, but also a “war room” with hundreds of chain-of-command-style boxes on every wall. The display graphically portrays at a glance the massive job they have in smoothly merging Litchfield High School and Wamogo High School into a single school system by the start of next year.
In many ways, the combined effect comes off as an architectural symbol of the superintendent himself. He returns from an early-morning pep rally up the hill at Wamogo in jeans and a sweatshirt to talk energetically with a sports writer about new plans and accomplishments already laid out in just one aspect of the total job.
Leone has been a key member of the community since he took over in 2017 as Superintendent in the Litchfield school system. Four years later, the town voted in favor of the merger into Region 20, combining Litchfield, Warren, Morris and Goshen into a single school district with Leone at its head.
“There’s been a great past, but we started something new,” Leone says, referring to a longstanding cross-town rivalry between the two high schools “that brought 1,000 people to rivalry basketball games.
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“Now the message will be, ‘You’re part of a community.’
For Leone and the Board of Education, including a member from each town involved, the two-year lead time was a combination of long-range pre-planning and, now, with deadlines approaching, getting down to the nuts and bolts.
“You can’t build a plane while you’re flying it,” he says. “We’re doing things as quickly (and creatively) as possible.”
In sports, that means the new school system’s athletic teams already have a Board-approved nickname – the Bobcats, complete with a set of logo/mascots for each school level, ranging from fierce for the still-unnamed high school to a Bobkitty for the elementary school kids.
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Job posting had to wait for the end of last month for the top sports job, a combined Dean of Students/Athletic Director, with “lots of applicants” by last week. Though the job officially begins July 1, Leone wanted to make the decision “yesterday” in hopes of clearing a path for the next level of hires – the coaching staffs.
Meanwhile, he’s relying on Wamogo Dean of Students/Athletic Director Mary Stolle and Litchfield Athletic Director Kyle Weaver for important input.
That includes a reward system for coaches who lead their teams to qualifying for states and state championships.
“None of us likes losing,” he says.
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Leone, a former athlete at New Milford High School, backs up his intensity with a creative clause in his own contract that “allows me to be a volunteer coach.
“It’s important to support our kids, whether it’s athletics, art, music or any other school activity,” Leone says
“In some sports now, we’re hardly able to field two squads. The merger brings greater opportunities and more depth. We are building a program that will dominate the Northwest Corner.
Groundwork for his enthusiasm comes from other decisions already in place: Litchfield High School will become the Region 20 Middle School, complete with all the high school sports facilities, including the Plum Hill fields.
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Wamogo becomes the Region 20 high school, with a bigger gym, its own playing fields and continued access to the Plum Hill facilities.
Some middle school sports have already merged this year.
Leone has a personal stake in athletic excellence thanks to his son, Xander, a junior captain on this year’s Wamogo soccer team, but his aspirations for Region 20 teams take the long view.
“The first step is Berkshire League titles. Next, we figure out how to compete at the state level. What do we learn?
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“Our goal is to compete with anybody and everybody,” he says.
Some people view the BL itself as an impediment to that. Its nine-school membership drops to eight with the Region 20 merger, including consistent mediocrity at the lower levels in most sports.
“Our goal is to win BL titles, but the conversation is long term for many of us,” Leone says. “The health of the league depends on people being creative in deciding what we want to make of the Berkshire League.”
“In some cases, that means scheduling tough non-league competition between league contests. In others, there are too many coaches and teams in the league or not enough, so co-oping with other schools makes sense.
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“We co-op with Nonnewaug in lacrosse and Wolcott Tech, Nonnewaug and Shepaug Valley in football. That’s being creative and it works.”
Leone also touts branching out in unique sports opportunities: “We have the only public school equestrian team in the state. Our rowing team works out with the Litchfield Hills Rowing Club and wins championships all over the country.”
The white house halfway up the Wamogo hill is a thing of beauty inside – totally unique from the austere institutional walls housing the administrators for many other school systems.
Its reality holds undeniable promise and meaning for Leone’s view of a new and improved sports future for Region 20: “We’re building experiences that will last a lifetime.”
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Oct 25, 2023
By Peter Wallace
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Tournament time