Rory Salimbene Lives to Serve

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Rory Salimbene didn’t plan on spending twenty years in the Army. He didn’t plan on enlisting at all. But when he cinched a nomination for a spot at West Point, his mother made her opinion clear.

“I don’t remember many conversations from when I was younger, but I’ll never forget this one,” the current chief facilities officer for Florida’s Orange County Public Schools recalls. “We were standing outside after finding out I had gotten nominated, and she told me she didn’t see any way that I could turn it down. I knew she was right.”

That nomination would change the trajectory of Salimbene’s life—and not just his two decades of military service and ten relocations with his family. The lessons he learned as a military officer have a way of creeping into his day-to-day work decades later.

One unexpected takeaway from Salimbene’s time in the Army was the importance of customer service. The customer service focus he developed was a byproduct of the interesting new opportunities that the Army kept offering him. For example, while he was director of public works at Fort Polk in Louisiana, his team decided to go after a coveted Baldrige Award, the highest level of national recognition a US-based organization can receive for performance excellence.

“Going through that process definitely influences how I approach my business today,” the chief facilities officer explains. “It ingrained in me the need to understand your customers, learning about who they are and how best to support them.”

Earlier in his career, Salimbene managed mitigation efforts for a series of hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest on behalf of the Army Corps of Engineers, where reaching agreement with a variety of environmental agencies helped him gain a greater appreciation for the importance of looking for win-win solutions.

Every year or two, something new came up, and the officer kept soldiering along. Every new opportunity presented a new management challenge and an opportunity to hone his leadership skills, which Salimbene recognizes as the takeaway from his military career that has the greatest impact on his current role.

Retiring from the military didn’t diminish Salimbene’s taste for a challenge. That’s how he wound up as facilities chief for Orange County Public Schools, the eighth-largest public school district in the United States. The district has 213 K–12 schools and serves nearly 208,000 students.

“I have been working with OCPS as my client for over 25 years. Their mission has been focusing on improving the education level for students so they can have better opportunities in their careers and lives,” says Tony Shahnami, founder of SGM Engineering, Inc.

“As a STEM volunteer, I have seen major improvements in the graduation levels from high school and higher education institutions. It takes a real effort from these institutions to provide a healthy environment with advanced technology that prepares students for a bright future.

“Rory’s leadership throughout the COVID pandemic has helped achieve this goal, letting students, faculty, and staff benefit from his expertise and commitment for a sustainable, healthy environment,” he adds.

OCPS’s location, funding, and relationship with the community is somewhat unique. Because the district serves as a tourist destination that includes Disney World and Universal Studios, Salimbene’s capital program is funded in part by a sales tax paid by out-of-state and international visitors.

“It is a luxury for me to direct a facilities program where funding to build and maintain schools is supplemented by visitors to the land of Mickey,” Salimbene explains. “A significant portion of our funding comes from sales tax, and it helps that half of that sales tax is paid by someone not from Orange County.”

Having spent over 20 years involved with school facilities in Florida, Salimbene understands the challenges of providing quality schools at the base funding levels authorized by the state. Good schools simply require additional, locally authorized funding. Salimbene puts it tactfully: “By pushing the funding responsibility to the local level, the state is telling local communities to decide the kind of schools they want to have.”

Fortunately, the communities that comprise OCPS have stood up for their students and have supported a sales tax for schools for more than 20 years. Salimbene takes the trust the district has built up over decades seriously. While the district tends to be conservative—the chief facilities officer says his team probably won’t win any awards for cutting-edge facilities and design—Salimbene’s team is focused on delivering quality schools responsive to the educational community’s needs and accomplishing it in a way that retains the public’s confidence in how their tax dollars are spent.

Florida requires school districts to reuse designs when feasible, and Salimbene’s team has this process down to a science. But recently, he was given the green light for three new prototypes—one each for the elementary, middle, and high school levels—with the district opening the first iteration of each this summer. This creates new and more sustainable school models that include more secure courtyards and flexible indoor and outdoor learning spaces.

While repeating these traditional schools is a significant element of the district’s future capital program, the chief facilities officer also gets the chance to tackle something original from time to time. The district is planning a new performing arts magnet school, a new gifted academy, and is in the middle of a complete makeover of the district’s technical education colleges.

Still, new facilities on greenfield sites are the easy part of Salimbene’s capital program. Part of the district’s facilities strategy includes a comprehensive renovation of schools at the 25-year mark and replacement of 50-year-old and older facilities. Carrying out that program for 213 schools means starting eight to ten multiyear renovation or replacement projects every year. And that’s in addition to the need to renew many systems on a more frequent cycle. All of that adds up. This past summer, Salimbene’s team was managing a billion dollars of construction and renovation work.

While helping a mammoth school district keep the lights on, students learning, and teachers teaching, Salimbene says the best part of life in central Florida is being settled after all those years of moving near four of his six grandchildren that he gets to see several times a week.

Between his family, his faith, and his work—which involves encouraging his team to think about the students they’re serving every day—Salimbene has lived to serve in a multitude of different capacities. As long as there’s a new challenge around the corner, it’s going to be tough to get the officer, builder, and leader to slow down.

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