O'Dell reflect on upcoming retirement, Celina Record

As retirement nears O’Dell reflects on education, career with Celina ISD Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com May 26, 2016 0 Sitting at a conference table in the room where he studied high school English as a teen, Donny O’Dell said not much has changed over the last half-century about the appearance of the building that now houses Celina ISD’s administrative offices. For years the place served as the schoolhouse for the city’s grammar and high school students. O’Dell was one of them. His third-grade classroom was across the hall, he recalled. He and his twin brother, Ronnie, used to play baseball and football on the playground during recess. Back then, O’Dell said, he could never have imagined that he would spend more than half of his career teaching and coaching in Celina, nor that he would helm its school district for several years. As he prepares for retirement next month, O’Dell said that his 42 years in education “have gone by so quickly, and really most of the time I never felt like I had a job. I was doing what I was supposed to do.” O’Dell had served as Celina ISD’s superintendent since 2012 before stepping down in January, and has spent the ensuing months in the role of assistant superintendent under current Superintendent Rick DeMasters. The district is growing and changing, and O’Dell said he is confident that the decision to close the book on his career now is the right one. “I felt like this was the appropriate time to step aside and let the future start,” he explained. Not before recalling a bit of the past, however. O’Dell played football and ran track for Celina during his junior high and high school years before graduating in 1968. “He was a real good athlete and hated to get beat,” recalled Jerry Moore, who was Celina Junior High School’s principal for more than three decades. He knew O’Dell while the two were growing up in Celina, and Moore hired him to teach math at the school in the early ‘70s. “He cared for everybody, whether it was his students or his coworkers,” Moore said. “I’ve met many people during the years and worked with many good people, but none any better than Mr. O’Dell.” O’Dell also became assistant coach that decade to legendary Celina High School head football coach G.A. Moore. The team won its first of eight state championships under the pair’s watch. “He was a heck of a football coach. He knew so much and the kids respected him so much, and he could get the kids to play hard,” G.A. Moore said. In 1977, O’Dell followed G.A. Moore to Pilot Point where the pair coached together for nine years before O’Dell returned to Celina to work for two years as the elementary school principal. He again became Celina’s assistant football coach, this time under head coach Joe Stubblefield, and returned to the classroom. O’Dell left the district again to become the head football coach at Sadler and Southmayd Consolidated ISD. During the six-year stint, he also served as the district’s athletic director and assistant superintendent. He returned to Celina for good in the mid 1990s and went to work as the high school principal, but said at that point his sights were set on becoming the district’s superintendent. The superintendent’s job was not an easy one, he said. “You’re not going to make everybody happy, but you still have to do the things that you have to do without any biases or not let something … someone else does affect how you feel about that job.” O’Dell gives much of the credit for his lengthy career to the people he worked alongside over the decades. “No one person is or makes a school district,” he said. “I always felt like if you could get people in key positions to help build the district and continue with what was good and build on what was already there that you would be successful.” “He leaves a great legacy here,” DeMasters said, adding that O’Dell “truly epitomizes and defines what this district is all about.” Above all, O’Dell said, “I guess the one thing I hope that people remember about me is that I was fair. ... I hope that people know that everything I did, I did for the benefit of the kids and the school district.”