Lessons from Middletown’s superintendent: Be a difference-maker

Middletown City Schools Superintendent Marlon Styles Jr. wants to be a difference maker and to make others into the same.

Styles said his mother and father were and continue to be the difference makers in his life. Even if only one was available, at least one of them was there to guide him during tough times, like taking the ACT multiple times or taking six years to complete college instead of the traditional four years or working to get his superintendent license at Xavier University at a relatively young age.

Styles, during Sunday’s ecumenical celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life at First Presbyterian Church, said people not only need difference makers, but they need to be difference makers themselves.

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“Not only do we need difference makers, we need to be difference makers,” Styles said. “That’s what we’re all here for today, to be difference makers. I challenge you all to be difference makers.”

Styles, 39, has guided the 6,400-student Middletown City Schools since last summer. He is the first permanent African-American superintendent in the history of Middletown City Schools. The district has previously had a black interim superintendent.

He said the Civil Rights leader was one of his difference makers.

“He taught me to dream and I mean dream big, I mean dream bigger than anybody would ever look at me and say ‘That’s possible or not possible,’” Styles said. “I never thought I’d be here, that was my goal, to be able to inspire young children, that was my dream.

“It took me 39 years to make it happen, 39 years for me to become the difference maker that I wanted to be so that you, you and you could be inspired.”

“Have your own dream, attach yourself to the dream of someone else and make a difference.”

Styles, whose previous job was as the executive director of curriculum and instruction for Lakota Local Schools, repeatedly emphasized the role education plays in shaping and guiding difference makers.

He asked those in the crowd to commit to rise up, tap into their underlying “Middie Pride”and become difference makers in the community.

“A lot of people are already doing it,” he said. “Let’s create a greater movement like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did to cause success in our young children to be educated. Let’s be the reason why we start to turn the corner here in Middletown and start becoming the discussion in a lot of different areas across this great nation about the wonderful things taking place.”

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