New Sierra Lutheran leader out to foster community

Pastor Micah Glenn couldn’t help but notice how close everyone seemed to each other as he started settling into Reno this year. In his first week, his sons were playing with another boy who would be attending Bethlehem Lutheran School. Glenn, coming from St. Louis, became the “new guy” in Carson Valley.

“I went to Walmart at Gardnerville, and I was there shopping and someone spotted me and said, ‘Are you the new head of school?’ ” Glenn said. “And she said, ‘My son goes there.’ And it really dawned on me how close of a community the valley is. And it’s a new thing to me. … This is a small community.”

Glenn, previously a director of recruitment, and his wife Dorothy had been approached to come to Sierra Lutheran High School to fill its head of school position and to assist with teaching. Dorothy serves as a deaconess but is in her first year as a classroom teacher while Glenn is overseeing the school’s administrative needs. While it is not their first official introduction to Reno, having visited in 2022, they officially relocated this summer after accepting the position and making Northern Nevada their home.

“We decided this is where God wanted us to come, not necessarily a leap of faith, but learning where the school needs me to be,” he said. “But the real part of it is I’m just blessed to be in the lives of these young people at this stage of their lives. It’s humbling, challenging, and after one week, I absolutely love it.”

Glenn thought about becoming a secondary teacher after he graduated from high school himself, although his path diverted and he would go on to try different things.

“Life has a way of taking you down on a path,” he said of his volunteer service in his local church and of some administrative work he took out of seminary.

Glenn was born in Honolulu and relocated several times as a military child before his family would settle in St. Louis. He became a Lutheran pastor but first worked for five years to encourage young people to think about entering the teaching profession, become pastors or consider other ministries. While hosting a high school event during seminary, he kept it in mind that he would want to become a teacher and visited Sierra Lutheran in 2022 and enjoyed what it had to offer. But as parents with three children, Jonathan, Talitha and David, in elementary school well established in their schools in St. Louis at a transitional age, the couple decided their future should be in St. Louis or Carson City where their children could grow comfortably into high school or beyond.

“We don’t want them constantly having to change,” he said of his kids. “It can be fun, it can be interesting, but we want them to be able to settle.”

Sierra Lutheran this year sought someone who could continue directing its activities as growth stays on a steady track. The school now is at an enrollment of 164 students, Glenn said. It will soon be “busting at the seams” without its addition, which the board approved and celebrated the groundbreaking for in May.

A multiphase capital expansion is in progress with the efforts of Van Woert Bigotti Architects, civil engineering and surveying firm Manhard Consulting and Metcalf Builders to construct a multipurpose hall that will create space for 100 more students.

More students eventually means the school will need more staff, naturally, Glenn said.

“With more students comes a need to build a deeper teaching faculty so that I’m not asking them to teach too many classes so that we keep a good student-teacher ratio, and it’s our desire to keep our tuition within reach of as many people as we can, which means we’ll need to raise some money,” he said.

To help with his priorities on keeping the capital project needs funded, he said he would rely on the school’s established staff such as dean of students Kitty Murphy, who served as the school’s interim head while the school conducted its search, as his “on-the-ground commanding officer” during daily tasks. He’ll also call on them to help with oversight of the curriculum.

Glenn said overall, his priorities will be to help complete the capital expansion and to get immersed in the community.

“Finishing the building project, at least this phase of it, is not something I have to do alone,” he said. “There are still some decisions that have to be made to keep things on track.”

He’d also rely on the board of directors’ input for higher-level issues affecting the school as next year’s legislative session approaches and to ensure Sierra Lutheran participates in discussions happening at the state level, he said.

But his desire is to keep an open-door policy and learn what’s important to the students, families and staff members of Sierra Lutheran.

“I don’t have a lot of time and patience for secrets,” Glenn said. “I’m just going to try my best to get to as many places and spaces as I can, to get to as many public meetings as I can to hear what people care about and to see what aspects of life are truly important to the people who are here, who have been established in the valley and are new to the valley.”

Glenn said it’s rare to find genuine people in a school anywhere else and has enjoyed meeting everyone since he arrived.

“At the moment, what I love is the hospitality, and I hope that Sierra Lutheran can reciprocate that, that we’re not a colloquialism, an isolated building on top of a hill but that we’re a place that people feel comfortable coming to in the heart of the family values and that they’re willing to help without you feeling you have to say yes to appease them in any way,” he said.