Dr. Charles Wilson, back in Pelham district as interim chief, talks about changes in the schools

By Margot Wies and Jamie Burke, Staff Reporters

COLONIAL LIBRARY — He’s back! Dr. Charles Wilson couldn’t stay away from Pelham schools, so he returned from his break from being school superintendent to serve as interim chief of the district.

He started being a teacher in other schools in 1969 and served as Pelham’s superintendent for 12 years before retiring. He knows almost everything about every school from Colonial to the high school. He said the best improvement to Colonial was construction of the library and Mrs. Anita Adolphus and Mrs. Kathryn Castellano’s classrooms.

During a talk with the staff of the Colonial Times, Dr. Wilson said when he was last here, there wasn’t as much technological equipment like SMART Boards, computers, laptops and the new iPads.

Did you know that Hutchinson has the most students of the elementary schools? We didn’t. That’s one of the many facts Dr. Wilson knows about the district. The superintendent is the boss of the staff, faculty and even the principal. But the school board is the boss of him.

Dr. Wilson has been a superintendent in Pelham and North Salem. He makes the decision if we have school or not on snow days. If you don’t want school on a day, you go to him.

What he likes best about being superintendent is that he can make improvements in the schools. The most challenging job for the superintendent is that if students are bad, he has to talk to them. He said he doesn’t like it when children are being bad and he has to punish them.

Dr. Wilson is serving until Pelham’s new superintendent, Mr. Peter Giarrizzo, starts in the job in July. You can read an interview with Mr. Giarrizzo here.

This story also appears on the Colonial Times website.