Thomas Ellinger, superintendent for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools Mediterranean District, is retiring after this school year, his 45th in the system. (Kent Harris / Stars and Stripes)
VICENZA, Italy — It’s not unusual for longtime educators to work with more than one generation of a single family.
But Thomas Ellinger, superintendent for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools Mediterranean District, started working for DODDS before many parents of the system’s current students were even born.
Ellinger, 70, is calling it quits after this school year, his 45th in the system.
“It’s been a wonderful career,” said Ellinger, who will retire with his wife to a home the couple is building in Jacksonville, Fla. “I’m really going to miss it.”
Many of the educators whom Ellinger worked with during long stops in Germany and Korea and shorter tours in Turkey and Italy say the same about him.
“He is an outstanding human being,” said Debbie Folmer, principal at Incirlik Elementary School in Turkey. “He’s a people person. His primary concern is always that the students, parents and teachers feel taken care of. And he spends an extraordinary amount of energy doing that.”
Ron McIntire, superintendent of the Bavaria District, said Ellinger makes his peers look bad.
“He loves getting up every morning and going to work,” McIntire said. “And he’s very good at it.
“Tom is a very forgiving and understanding leader. That’s why people like him so much.”
Ellinger’s career with DODDS began in 1960 with a teaching position in Okinawa, Japan. He had already been overseas, though, having been born in Germany in 1935. He remembers his family narrowly escaping death in an Allied bombardment near Frankfurt during World War II. The family immigrated to the States shortly after the war.
For that first DODDS job, he and about 300 other teachers spent 18 days on a ship sailing with family members to Okinawa.
“By the time we got there, we knew the families and some of the kids we were going to teach,” he said.
He liked traveling by ship so much that he took another one to his next assignment in Germany. He would spend 18 years as a teacher, guidance counselor and principal in places such as Kaiserslautern, Frankfurt and Hanau.
In 1980, he became superintendent in South Korea and stayed at that job for 16 years. He says that assignment and the one following in Turkey — where he was superintendent for the now defunct Turkey/Spain/Isles District — stand out a bit more than the others.
“It’s a little more challenging to live in those places, and a little more exciting,” he said.
Ellinger has been superintendent of the Mediterranean District, which has 18 schools in Italy, Spain and Turkey, since 2001. He makes it a practice to visit each school at least twice a year, so he gets in plenty of traveling.
Last week, he spent a day as a high school student in Vicenza, mingling with the kids in their classes.
“I realized how much more the kids know these days than I do,” he said, laughing.
Ellinger’s wife, Elizabeth, actually began teaching in the system that would eventually become known as DODDS before he did. She started in the States in 1958 and retired after 40 years when the couple moved to Italy.
Ellinger doesn’t hesitate when asked if he would recommend a career with DODDS to a young teacher, even with an uncertain future caused by looming base closures in places such as Germany.
He recalls one of the first staff meetings in Okinawa.
“I distinctly remember the principal saying: ‘Don’t think you’ll make a career doing this, because some day, Russia and the U.S. will make peace and there won’t be any people overseas and no dependent schools.’ ”
Even with changes to DOODS likely, “a young person can make that transition,” Ellinger said. “There might not be any more 45-year careers. Not that most people would want to go that long anyway.”
