You may have noticed a few new faces around Federal Hocking, one of them being Jason Spencer, our new superintendent.
Spencer graduated in 1994 from Morgan High School. He played football, ran track, wrestled, and he also played basketball for one year. After high school, he went to Bowling Green State University where he played football and ran track. He is married and has three children, he also has a little dog named Crystal. Some of his hobbies are lifting and training,
“I love turning my body into something I can be proud of.”
Spencer says he likes to help people who truly want to see a change. He also loves camping, being outside, and fishing. Once he went camping for two months!
You’d ever guess it but the intimidating looking man really likes photography.
“I was less intimidating looking when I had hair.”
He says that he was the person who took all the photos for his highschool yearbook. He says if he wasn’t a superintendent he could see himself having a career in photography, or something to do with business or sports administration. He also really likes to travel. He’s traveled to Europe, the Caribbeans, Honduras, Bermuda, Jamaica, Alaska, and many more places. He would like to go to Egypt, Greece, Yellowstone National Park, and he wants to go out west. He says that he can see himself living in a beach house in Florida in ten years.
Spencer was originally going to college to be a nurse because his dad was a paramedic and his mom was a nurse so it was all he knew. He also switched his major to theater because he wanted to be an actor, but it just never happened. He got the opportunity to work with kids at a youth camp during college and he just knew it was what he wanted to do, so he became a teacher.
He has a clear direction when it comes to classroom priorities.
“The most important priority in my classroom was figuring out how I could help the kids love learning, how I could bring the material they need to learn, and how I could make it exciting.”
Showing effort in his class was important, if you showed effort you were most likely to pass. That one lightbulb moment when a student would finally get what he was trying to teach was a good feeling for Spencer, it made him feel accomplished. Another big priority was classroom management, to him if you can’t manage a classroom you can’t teach it.
As Spencer gets to know the halls of Federal Hocking, he’s also getting to know the people.
“The kids have been very respectful, very pleasant, they’ve been very welcoming and genuinely nice.”
He has four goals for our school: improving the safety, academics, communication, and finances. To him Federal Hocking feels like home. Spencer says that he loves that he has the chance to improve the academics here.
However there were some changes during the move from his old school to Federal Hocking. Before he started his job here he was working at Cincinnati public school. He said going from a large 36,000 student school, to a 750 school is nice because you get to know everyone.
Spencer has some words of advice for students. He wants students to not take everything so seriously. He said if you are in tears over high school, then you aren’t doing it right. He also says to do the little thing everyday and be persistent.
“I was told a thousand times I would never make it to college and I would never do anything in life, but when I was told I couldn’t do something I would make it my mission to do just that.”
Spencer has one more piece of advice to share with students.
“Don’t take criticism from people who you would not take advice from and don’t take advice from people who aren’t actually doing it.”
He said that he is here for the students and to believe in ourselves.
So, if you ever see Dr. Spencer around the school don’t be afraid to say hello and ask how his day is going.
