GREENVILLE – Xenia High School Principal David Torrence, a former Greenville Assistant High School Principal was in town Tuesday night to watch the Xenia Buccaneers take on the Greenville Green Wave boys basketball team in MVL action.
Torrence shared this will be his last year in education as he will be retiring later this year after 30 years in education.
“I’m going to watch all the movies I haven’t watched in the last 25 years and I’m going to read a bunch of books that I haven’t had time to read in the past 25 years,” Torrence said with a smile. “I’m going to take care of my daughter who will be a senior next year at Northmont and my wife has decided I should learn how to clean stuff.”
As far as cooking goes … “I can do passable, four or five dishes so I think I’m ok there … she’s real big on the cleaning things.”
Torrence’s first year at GHS was welcomed by an OHSAA Greenville Lady Wave Softball State Championship.
“I got here the year the girls won the state championship in softball, 2006-2007 and I was here until 2019,” he noted.
Leaving Greenville was a big promotion stepping into the role of High School Principal for the Xenia Community Schools.
“I took a promotion to be the building principal at Xenia just in time to do COVID,” Torrence said. “My first year as a building principal was the year of COVID and then we dug ourselves out of COVID. Now we’re just trying to get back to normalcy which is probably still five or six years away.”
Torrence took time to talk about changes he has seen over the past 30 years in Education at the high school level.
“I always tell the kids the problems are always the same problems so while it is new for the kid, because the kids never had that kind of issue before. For the adults it’s the same issues we’ve been dealing with – it’s just new faces,” he said. “The biggest change is the whole technology thing and now a greater awareness of mental health. Just how many kids had issues that affect what happens in the classroom that we sort of didn’t pay attention to in the past, you just walked it off as the kid was odd or the kid just needed to be tougher.”
As Mr. Torrence moves into his final year in education, he still encourages you folks to get involved in education.
“I tell kids when they tell me they’re going to teach – I thank them and then I ask them if they’re crazy because we desperately need people to help take care of kids but we still don’t treat the people who teach and who work with kids every day the way that we need to get that kind of quality people.”
“For me, it’s always been great especially when I come back here to Greenville,” Torrence concluded. “I still see kids we worked with here that are now parents, they have jobs, they’re taking care of family members, they’re doing all kinds of good things and you feel good about being able to help them in those ways.”
