Lynnfield — Principal Robert Cleary of Lynnfield High School (LHS) is retiring at the end of the school year, and the search for his replacement is on.
The school committee announced their search timeline at a Dec. 13 committee meeting. The job opening was posted on SchoolSpring on Dec. 12 and will remain up until mid-January, with the first round of interviews beginning Feb. 1. The committee is hoping to make a decision by Feb. 24.
Superintendent of Lynnfield Public Schools Kristen Vogel said, “We will be keeping the posting open for a month. We were strategic about that in that we had talked initially about posting after the holiday break … but we decided that we would post actually before to give possible candidates time over the December vacation to get materials together.”
The committee has sent out surveys to parents, faculty and staff in the community, and students will also be involved in the interview process.
“The two students who sit on the superintendent student advisory will be the students sitting on the interviewing committee,” Vogel said.
Cleary has been the principal at LHS for 15 years and believes it’s time to step down to allow someone new to come in and “make their mark.”
“It’s been a great community to work in. The students are awesome, staff is great. The community has been super supportive all throughout and, again, administration at every level has just been awesome to work with,” Cleary said.
While the job has had its “headaches” along the way, he said he will miss a lot about it.
“You know, there are very few days that something doesn’t happen during the day that brings a smile to my face,” Cleary said. “I will certainly miss just standing in a building with six or seven hundred people in it. It’s going to be a very different tempo, you know, different schedule that I’ll be running … it’s a bittersweet kind of thing.”
He is glad the size of LHS has allowed him to have a connection with the students.
“When you get into educational work with children, and then the further up you go into administration, you see less and less of children in the classroom, but I love the size of the school, where it’s still small enough that you get into a lunch room or stand in the hallway, you still recognize a lot of faces, and you’re able to kind of still have that connection with students,” Cleary said.
His advice for the new principal is to step out of the way and let the teachers do their job in educating the students — to “let that magic happen.”
“Trust the folks that are here in these classrooms. Our staff does a dynamite job, and I think that relationship between students and teachers and support staff is a really solid one,” Cleary said.
