With just a month remaining in outgoing Superintendent Angela Grunewald’s tenure, Edmond Public Schools announced Josh Delich as its new superintendent. Delich previously served as associate superintendent for two of Minnesota’s largest school districts.
Delich has 21 years of education experience and holds a bachelor’s degree from Concordia University at St. Paul, a master’s from the University of Texas at Arlington and a doctorate from the University of North Texas. Delich began his career as a middle school teacher in Texas before moving to Minnesota, where he was most recently associate superintendent at Anoka-Hennepin Public Schools, the state’s largest public school district. He previously served as assistant superintendent at St. Paul Public Schools, Minnesota’s second-largest district.
Born in Bogotá, Colombia, before being adopted and raised in the United States, Delich grew up alongside siblings adopted from Brazil and Ecuador. Delich’s hire is the result of a search conducted by the Oklahoma State School Boards Association.
“I am looking forward to the experience that Edmond Public Schools and Edmond, Oklahoma, has to offer,” Delich said at his Monday morning introductory press conference. “I just continue to be amazed with the immense amount of welcoming and the sense of belonging that we have here in this area.”
Delich will succeed Grunewald, who announced in January she will retire at the end of the current school year, May 21. Although her education career spanned three decades, her four years as EPS superintendent were arguably the most eventful. Grunewald was at the helm of EPS through the COVID-19 pandemic and a high-profile legal battle with Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters that saw EPS’ accreditation status threatened.
Recently-appointed Edmond Public Schools Board of Education president Courtney Hobgood praised Delich’s “passion” for his field.
“We are confident as you get to know Dr. Delich, you will find him to be the collaborative, thoughtful and humble leader who we selected,” Hobgood said.
Delich outlined a simple set of goals for his first year as superintendent: “listen, learn, lead, act, execute.”
“I want to infuse myself and integrate myself into a system to best learn what is going on with Edmond in terms of the excellence that’s happening and also look at the areas that we need to improve in advance,” Delich said.
Delich said he feels comfortable stepping into Edmond, a district of roughly 26,000 students, from his previous posts. The Anoka-Hennepin district’s enrollment is roughly 38,000, and St. Paul Public schools has around 33,000 enrolled students.
The size of the district Delich will now lead is a minor change compared to the political and public education landscape contrasts between Oklahoma and Minnesota, a state that consistently scores much higher than Oklahoma in education rankings and currently spends about $7,000 more per student.
Delich: ‘I look forward to meeting Ryan Walters’
Delich said he was eager to work with Walters, despite past tensions with the district.
“When you have conflict, you have differences, you’ve got to sit down and create the space to better understand the perspectives on one side, as you may have perspectives on the other. How do you find that striking balance between where we both might lie?” Delich said. “I look forward to meeting Ryan Walters and spending some time to know the individual, get to know him, also for him to get to know me, and then figure out where can we align, and where can we best keep moving things forward, because I know that if you’re in the world of education, it’s about students.”
He also noted the more general differences in Oklahoma’s Republican supermajority versus Minnesota’s narrowly Democrat-led legislature, prioritizing relationship building with Edmond’s legislative delegation to advocate for the district’s interests.
“Any time you go into a role, whatever role it is, you’re always going to have the legislative dynamics that you’re going to have to work through. I think it again goes to, how do you create space and opportunity to engage with legislators, politicians, people that are able to work in collaboration for influencing what’s best for kids?” Delich said. “When I look at any state, it’s trying to become more familiar with some of those dynamics. At the end of the day, it’s how do you spend time and create space that you can really engage with people in legislative roles so that you can advocate for the students and the needs that are happening in your current district?”
With the district constructing a pair of new schools within the next decade, Delich said he hopes to overcome national teacher recruitment and retention challenges by prioritizing workplace culture.
“What I will bring into Edmond is really, how do you create an environment and a culture where every single person feels that sense of belonging? One of the core values here in Edmond Public Schools is we create environments where people wake up every single morning excited about the work that’s going on,” Delich said. “I think working through the current structures that we have in place on how we are approaching that work, and then also, once learning more about that, saying, ‘How can I help support making sure that this is a place where people come, they want to come here, and they don’t want to leave?'”
Delich’s official start date is July 1, though he acknowledged he will be “working through some transition,” including his family’s roughly 800-mile move to Edmond. In the interim, outgoing Superintendent Angela Grunewald said she will be “behind [Delich] supporting him.”
