front & center

Dennis Rittle

Overcoming odds to a better life

— Dennis Rittle believes in education - so much so that he earned five degrees after he was married with children.

He is the first college graduate of his immediate family, and his passion for education has spilled over into his career as the new vice president of academic affairs at Ozarka College in Melbourne.

Rittle began teaching in 1994 when he was in the U.S. Air Force working as a meteorologist.

“When I was in grade school, I always wanted to know the when, why and how there were different [weather] forecasts for the same area,” he said. “It was frustrating.”

When he was in high school, he coded a program that would accurately forecast the weather, using what he calls “marginal thinking.”

“Years later, [my instructor] said he still used my program, and it was more accurate than the local weather [forecasts],” Rittle said with a smile.

Likening the relationship between an educator and a learner to the dynamics of weather, Rittle said he began thinking of ways he could help enrich the lives of adult learners.

“Education is an important piece of the puzzle to a good quality of life,” he said. “If I’m not making their lives and communities better, they shouldn’t have me here. … I can’t make you learn, but I can make an environment to make you want to learn.”

Learning hasn’t always come easy for Rittle. A a child, his third-grade teacher, Mrs. Sheirk, helped him deal with having attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. As a“latch-key kid,” Rittle had little supervision. He said he walked home from school and was on his own for hours.

“She took my energy and challenged me,” he said about his teacher.

Growing up with a troubled home life, Rittle found himself in the middle of making choices. He attributes many of his good choices to his involvement in a neighborhood church.

“At that point, school was a big voice in my life,” he said. “When you don’t have a good moral compass in life, you can make bad choices. The church was that for me and kept me from making bad choices. … If you don’t have that nurturing at home, you look for acceptance elsewhere, and for me, the church was a godsend in my life and helped me to develop good character.”

When Rittle was 12, his mother committed suicide after a long battle with schizophrenia and multiple-personality disorder. Although he said his mother was compassionate, patient, brilliant and loving in her “right mind,” when she wasn’t in her “right mind,” things could turn extremely violent. Many times, it was safer for the Rittle children to be out of their mother’s home.

“I was given a low probability of surviving past the age of 18,” he said. “What helped me overcome was my marginal thinking that I could fight the statistics. I’m the salmon swimming upstream.”

Armed with the knowledge that his family was vulnerable to alcoholism, Rittle chose to focus on his education and make the choice not to drink and not to repeat the choices of his parents.

“I want my children to know their father loves them,” he said. “I tell them I love them multiple times every day. I didn’t get that.”

Bringing that experience into the classroom, Rittle has developed ways of making a learning environment better. Much of his job is strategizing and partnering with local businesses to meet their needs.He said adults learn differently than children, and adult learners are looking for something that is relevant to their needs.

“Forty years ago, 70 percent of all jobs didn’t require anything beyond a high school education,” he said. “Today, it has flopped. Seventy percent requires some kind of secondary education. Instead of a hired hand, today, we hire a mind.”

He said employers are looking for character and a soft skill set.

“They are looking at the whole person and not what they can physically do,” he said. “Education is an investment in a human life. Until that journey is over, education is an investment, and we get a return on that investment.”

Rittle earned a doctorate in organizational leadership with a major in human resource development from the School of Global Leadership and Entrepreneurship at Regent University.

He also served on the staff of the Kansas Board of Regents, where he aligned technical curriculum for post-secondary institutions across the state of Kansas. He also served as a technical education administrator at Butler Community College in Kansas, which has an enrollment of more than 12,000 students. He was also a program director, instructor and curriculum writer for the Community College of the Air Force.

In addition to his educational career, he has spoken at numerous national and international business and leadership conferences, including serving as a guest lecturer in Oxford, England.

He has written for The Journal of Business and Leadership, Effective Executive, HRM Review, Global CEO and theJournal of Advances in Business Research. He is also the author of Managing Conflict Within Top Management Teams in NonProfit Organizations.

“Ozarka College is so very fortunate to have a chief academic officer with Dr. Rittle’s experience and professionalism join the college team,” Ozarka College president Richard Dawe said.

“He will play a leading role in helping us advance new and exciting programs for our students.”

Staff writer Jeanni Brosius can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or jbrosius@arkansasonline.com.

up close

getting to know Dennis Rittle

Occupation: Vice president of academic affairs at Ozarka College in Melbourne

Family: Rittle and his wife, Christy, have been married for 20 years and have two children, Daniel and Childress.

Hometown: Lebanon, Pa.

Birth date: March 3, 1970

Biggest Influences: Mrs. Sheirk, my third-grade teacher. She challenged me and channeled my hyperactivity in a positive way. Also, my professional mentor is Jacqueline Vietti, who is the president of Butler County Community College in El Dorado, Kan. She has really helped me develop as an administrator in education, and she continues to invest in me.

Hobbies: Playing with my children: Daniel, 16, and Childress, 10. I also like canoeing and racquetball.

Something most people don’t know: My mother committed suicide, and I was put up for adoption and raised in many different homes and slept on many floors.

Something I want to accomplish: I want to write a bestseller.

Three Rivers, Pages 122 on 07/29/2012

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