The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘Kindness and caring’ open new school year
Students greeted with new leadership
EAST HAMPTON » The doors swung open on a new school year Wednesday.
Schools official anticipate more than 1,850 students will fill the town’s four schools. But it will be Oct. 1 before they have a more definite enrollment count.
“The first day opening never gets old,” said Superintendent of Schools Paul K. Smith as he prepared for opening day. “The first day of school annually offers the promise that every child can and will be successful in finding their passion for life,” he said excitedly.
As the hundreds of fresh faces filed into Memorial, Center, the middle and high schools Wednesday, there were also new faces to greet them. There are new principals at
both Memorial and Center schools.
Andrew Gonzalez, who was most recently an elementary principal in Lebanon, is the new principal at Memorial.
Chris Sullivan, who was the assistant principal at the middle school, is now the principal at Center School.
Eric Kissinger, a former teacher at a CREC magnet school, has taken over Sullivan’s previous position as assistant principal at the middle school.
Meanwhile, Mary Clark, who has been principal at Center School since 2015, has moved up to the central office, where she is now the new director of curriculum for the school district. Clark is an East Hampton native and graduate of the high school. She worked in both magnet and public schools elsewhere in the state before returning home in 2015 to take over the reins at the Center School.
Meanwhile, Nancy Briere has been named interim principal at the high school following the sudden death last month of John H. Fidler. Briere will remain in the position until Dec. 31, by which time Smith hopes to be able to name a full-time replacement for Fidler.
It is not the first time Briere has stepped in position that had been vacated by Fidler. He was principal at the middle school when he was chosen to lead the high school in 2011. Briere, who was assistant principal at the middle school, stepped up to take over as principal.
The high school has been undergoing a $51 million renovation and that work is now substantially complete. A rededication of the school will take place Sept. 8.
The opening of school will also herald the initiation of a new program that was, in part, inspired by the clamorous events in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month, Smith said. “We have started a new initiative in all four of our schools: ‘Making Kindness and Caring Common,’” Smith explained. The program was developed using research done at Harvard, he said.
“But the impetus primarily for us [was] the events in Charlottesville,” Smith said. “I believe that we must indeed be purposeful in promoting kindness and caring in our school community and in the community-atlarge,” Smith said.
“I am fully committing the schools of East Hampton as places that will promote kindness and caring — not because we don’t already, but because we constantly need to ensure that our students experience kindness and caring as youths if we want them to prosper as kind and caring adults,” Smith said.