David Piperato was born and raised in the Lehigh Valley. He was raised in a blue-collar family, with his mom a hair stylist and his dad owned a roofing and siding company.

Piperato attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through high school.Now Piperato is the superintendent of Pleasant Valley, one of the districts he competed against while in school. He was hired by the school board in March to replace then Superintendent Carole Geary, who retired July 31."I grew up wanting to be a math teacher," Piperato said. "But I attended college in the early '80s when there just weren't a lot of jobs for teachers, so I studied business instead."By his junior year at Bloomsburg University, Piperato decided that teaching was really what he wanted to do. He compromised and instead became a high school business teacher.Teaching careerPiperato began teaching in the Bethlehem School District in 1984 where he also coached basketball. He took his first administrative position with Palisades School District in Bucks County where he served as an assistant high school principal for two years and a principal for four years before taking the high school principal's position at Lower Merion.Piperato, whose family resides in Bushkill, found the commute to Lower Merion to be a bit much, and when the high school principal's position opened up at Emmaus Piperato made the move. Piperato remained at Emmaus for 10 years."I always knew that one day I wanted to be a superintendent of a school district, but I did not want to make that move too early in my career," Piperato said. "I wanted to wait until I was further along in my career to make that move."Piperato originally applied for the Pleasant Valley superintendent position not thinking he would be considered for it."I knew about Pleasant Valley by reputation as a good school. I knew it to be a very community-oriented district," he said. "I also knew that the schools here were performing very well. I like the quaint feel of the district."When asked why he thought he was chosen for the position, Piperato said he believes it was because of his leadership style. Piperato believes in trying to be collaborative."I believe that you have to value those in your organization. People need to know that they are important to the process, to achieving the goal," he said.Pleasant ValleyThroughout the course of the interview process, Piperato became more and more interested in Pleasant Valley and began to believe that he might be chosen.Piperato says he is very surprised by how committed and genuine the staff and faculty are at Pleasant Valley."The people here really care about each other in a way I did not experience in my other districts," Piperato said. "The teachers that come here to teach, come here to stay."Piperato sees the challenges that the district faces as being related to the declining enrollment."The enrollment here has been going down since 2008 and I admire Carole Geary for some of the creative ways the district has dealt with that up to now," Piperato said. "We are going to have to strike a balance with fair and consistent decision making while always keeping the big picture of what is best for the kids front and center."Where does Piperato see the district in the next five years?"I see tremendous potential to achieve a much higher level of academic excellence," Piperato said. "I see the district as a seven out of 10, much better than average at most things and very, very good at certain things. But everything can always improve."First order of business"I need to tend to the culture and climate first. First the staff and faculty," he said. "Once the team is taken care of the rest will come from that."Piperato doesn't see any insurmountable items that concern him at the moment, but rather the more he sees of the district the more he likes it."The one area I will be working on though is working to build trust between the staff and the faculty," Piperato said. "That is something I wish I could do immediately. There seems to be a lack of trust there, and I want to build on that."Piperato's wife, Heather, is the director of secondary education for the East Stroudsburg School District."Date night in our household usually involves dinner and a school musical at one district or the other," Piperato says. "When Heather was a principal we rarely saw each other on Friday nights during football season."The Piperatos have two sons. David, 24, a graduate of Penn State with a degree in biology, is an emergency room technician and Jonathan, 22, a recent Bloomsburg University graduate, is a high school math teacher in Southern Lehigh.