ROYALSTON — About a month after the start of the school year, Royalston Community School found itself leaderless. At the most recent of the Athol Royalston Regional School Committee meeetings, Superintendent Nancy Fernandes announced that Cinthia Reilly, who had taken the job of principal over the summer, had vacated the office due to personal reasons. For a time, Fernandes explained, administrators and educators from other schools in the district did their best to fill the void.
At last week’s meeting, Fernandes, introduced Dr. Cynthia Kennedy as the interim principal for RCS.
Kennedy said she was a fifth-grade teacher for more than a decade before taking time off to raise her four children.
“When they were all in school, I went back to work and was a fifth-grade teacher in Chicopee,” she said. “Then I decided I wanted to go into administration, so I was an acting principal there for a little bit. I then went on to Westfield public schools and was an assistant principal at the middle school.”
The superintendent in Westfield then asked Kennedy to take a job as principal at one of the city’s elementary schools. At that time, the school she led had about 500 students. While holding down the principal’s job, she worked online to earn a doctorate in educational leadership from University of New England in Maine. Last spring, she was asked to join the university as an adjunct advisor working with doctoral students.
Asked if she would be interested in assuming the RCS job on a permanent basis, Kennedy said, “So far, I love working in Athol-Royalston, but I can’t make any promises because the ultimate decision isn’t up to me. I will be here until June. That’s a definite. Beyond that, I think you’d have to ask Superintendent Fernandes.”
Kennedy said one of her top priorities upon starting her job was hammering down the class schedule.
“The way the schedule was set up,” she explained, “it just wasn’t working. Setting up a schedule is like doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. Sometimes it looks good on paper, but it just doesn’t work out in reality. We need to make sure we have enough coverage at lunch and recess, bus duty and things like that, and for student safety, of course.”
She said making sure schedules met conditions established in the teachers’ contract was also a priority. The new schedule, she said, would be implemented on Monday.
“On Tuesday,” she continued, “we’re going to have an all-school meeting to roll out some behavioral expectations. Of course, the district has adopted the five components of social/emotional learning, so we’re going to focus a little more on that.”
Kennedy added an RCS Bucks program is being added to the school, similar to a program under way at Athol Community Elementary School. The program, under which students can earn points toward acquiring a variety of tangible items, allows the school to positively acknowledge students who are “complying with the rules and doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”
“I really admire this,” she said, “that Superintendent Fernandes has strategic objectives for the district, and they are very learning-focused; they’re student-centered. And they use learning walks and teacher observations that are used as a structure to talk about teaching and learning. That’s one of the reasons I was really excited to come here, because I hold myself to very high standards. I knew right away from talking to Darcy Fernandes that she does the same for herself and her staff.”
Kennedy said one of her main motivations for taking the RCS job was a return to working with students.
“I really missed that connection,” she said. “So, I was lucky enough to be able to say, ‘Gee, maybe I’ll explore the option of going back into public education, but it needed to be the right fit. I felt my skill set was a good match for the issues facing RCS. But, in the end, I was really drawn to working with Darcy Fernandes. That was the deciding factor.”
Kennedy is the fourth principal at RCS in the past two years.