Scott Wickham had never had an exit interview until last week. Fresh out of college in 1993, Wickham found a job at Saugerties High School (SHS) as a business education teacher; he’s never worked anywhere else.
“My exit interview was today and I didn’t even know what to expect cause I’ve never been through one,” Wickham said.
During his time at Saugerties High, Wickham helped found the wildly popular Computer Video Production (CVP) courses, since renamed Marketing: Video Production. As the varsity wrestling coach, he brought the energy and pizzazz of the WWE into the senior high gym. And for 31 1/2 years, he taught business education.
Wickham has become so synonymous with Saugerties High that it’s surprising to learn that he grew up around 85 miles northwest of there, in a small town called Otego, just outside of Oneonta. He stayed close to home for college, earning his Bachelors Degree at SUNY Oneonta. It was there that Wickham student taught under Dr. John Clow, who had a former student who’d taken a job at a school in Westchester County, leaving behind a business education role at Saugerties High.
“(Dr. Clow) said, ‘Here’s (then-SHS principal) Bob Potter’s number,” Wickham recalled. “Tell him I told you to call.’ And that’s just how the ball got rolling. I interviewed on, I think it was a Tuesday and they said ‘We’re going to take a week, we have other interviews,’ and two days later they said, ‘If you want the job it’s yours. We’d love to have you.’ And it just worked out.”
On paper, the story seems very straightforward. But told by Wickham, with his own personal panache, it’s clear why he was such a popular teacher at Saugerties High, and why his energy over three decades may have been difficult for even his students to keep up with.
But back in the beginning, Wickham wasn’t sure he was going to last at SHS.
“It was my second year, and I had a class of two kids,” he said. “And I was like, “I’ve got to do something, because I’m not going to be here very long if this is it’.”
To help sell business education to Saugerties students, Wickham put together a promotional slideshow that inadvertently opened up new avenues for him at SHS. He built on that a few years later by helping create one of the district’s early websites, and turned that into a website design course.
“It was kind of primitive, but that’s when the motivation came,” he said. “And YouTube was right around the corner in the early 2000’s and I was like, ‘We’ve got to jump on video creation so that students can learn how to develop videos responsibly, so they know content is not just putting a camera on somebody and acting dumb.”
CVP will celebrate its 20th year at SHS this year, and even back at the beginning Wickham was surprised by its popularity.
“I created a half-year curriculum and I had 15 kids in the class, and we ran out of time,” he said. “We got to broadcast journalism a couple years later, and at one time in our peak we probably had 150 kids in the program and just in those three courses. It was a monster.”
The CVP program was built with fellow SHS business teacher Jacqueline Hayes, and it began to make its mark across the school and district, with video production elements at the annual Lip-Sync, and a newsroom-style daily announcement that requires students to arrive when many of their classmates haven’t even hit the snooze button.
Wickham’s own children have also been his students, including Kelsey, currently heading up the human resources department for a recruiting firm in Miami, Florida; Kylie, a practicing lawyer in Providence, Rhode Island; and Shay, who recently graduated from Quinnipiac University after majoring in business analytics.
Meanwhile, as of Friday, January 24, Wickham is officially retired. At least for the time being. He acknowledged that it was unusual to leave in the middle of the school year, but said he knew he was ready.
“I love my job, but I was just driving in one day and I thought, ‘I wonder if they’d let me go ’,” he said. “I’m tired. I packed a lot into 31 1/2 years and I was just I was just exhausted at the time. And there was no other reason for it, I was just ready.”
Wickham said he was supported in his decision by members of the SHS business department and district superintendent Daniel Erceg.
As for what happens next, well, Wickham isn’t entirely sure. He sold his house in 2023, but isn’t planning to leave the area. He’s retired, but he isn’t retired.
“I’m waiting for the dust to settle,” he said. “I might take the month of February off and just kind of figure some things out.”
Wickham has maintained what he called his “side hustle,” transferring video tapes and movie reels to digital formats. He said he’s far too young and energetic to stop altogether.
“I cannot sit down for a long period of time,” Wickham said. “That’s for sure.”
Join the family! 
