BRUNSWICK

Faculty, staff, students and parents met and interrogated the last of three candidates Thursday for the vacant principal’s post at Brunswick High School.

The candidate is a military veteran with 15 years of administrative experience in Maine schools, and postgraduate degrees from University of Southern Maine and the Edmund G. Muskie School of Government.

However, because he is employed at a regional school and did not want to cause undue alarm among his current constituency, the candidate asked that his identity be withheld pending a decision by the principal search interviewing committee. The Times Record is honoring the request.

Parents and community members in Brunswick liked what they heard during Thursday’s 45-minute question and answer session. Compared with the two candidates who were introduced Monday and Tuesday, Thursday’s finalist ranks in the middle with regard to experience and diversity of accomplishment.

He explained how he has striven to increase his current student body’s achievement scores and college acceptance in the midst of dwindling resources, and how federal and state grantwriting, as well as partnership with local business and community colleges, have helped to fill gaps in classroom instruction.

Likewise, the transition from conventional number grades to a Common Core curriculum that focuses instead on proficiency at current grade level. The key to earning school-wide proficiency, he said, is to concentrate resources and efforts on the “middle level” students who need more attention but seldom ask for it.

Those students, the third candidate said, do well enough to avoid remedial placement but not so well that they excel — and that’s why they are “in danger of falling through the cracks” with regard to post-secondary education or skilled trade schools.

Top-echelon students are self-motivated to learn, while special needs kids get most of the attention and resources, he said.

“It’s the middle group of students that we’re trying to get to a ‘3’ level, which is grade-level proficiency,” he said. “You can’t keep teaching to the average because life is not an average. You have to teach to the standard and, over time, the standard becomes more difficult to achieve.”

Additionally, he believes that integration of skilled trade education is key.

“Technical education is becoming much more savvy than it used to be,” he said. “It’s not ‘the vocational school kid’ anymore. It’s much more geared toward success for college than it ever was before.”

Interview committee members expect to send their recommendation to District Superintendent Paul Perzanoski by the end of next week, who said he would have his own recommendation ready for the full School Board by the end of October.

jtleonard@timesrecord.com

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