HAMPDEN, Maine — Hampden Academy’s new principal said that despite her nearly 20 years of experience in education, she is at the start of a new learning curve.
“I need to see what’s working here first,” she said. “This is my first year here, and my job really is to be a good listener,” Leigh Larson said Wednesday during an interview at her office.
Hampden Academy serves RSU 22 students from the towns of Hampden, Winterport, Newburgh and Frankfort.
Larson and her fiance, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, arrived in Maine on July 2 after a cross-country drive from their former home near Anchorage, Alaska. Larson officially assumed her new position on Aug. 1.
Larson said she and her fiance decided to move to Maine in December and that she began looking for job postings shortly thereafter.
“We’d been talking about it for awhile,” she said, noting that her fiance’s parents live in Levant and that he has a brother in the Bangor area. The couple resides in Hermon.
Larson said Wednesday that she has an indirect connection to Maine. Her older brother was born here while her father was stationed at the former Brunswick Naval Air Base.
“People here are very friendly, very kind. I don’t think I ever met a stranger,” she said.
“I feel so fortunate to be here with the staff we have. They’re all great people, which is critical” as the school district continues to work toward improving the delivery of education to local students.
Larson is an avid outdoorswoman, counting fishing, hunting and road and mountain biking as among her favorite activities. And after having lived most of her life in Alaska, Larson notes that she is well prepared for Maine winters, which in some years have been harsher than those in Alaska.
“Last winter, I only had to take out my snow shovel once,” Larson said.
Larson succeeds Ruey Yehle, who had been the high school’s principal since 2002 and who also has served as curriculum coordinator during her nearly four-decade career in education. Yehle stayed on through the end of August to help with the transition before retiring.
According to an article announcing Larson’s hire in a recent issue of Link-22, the school unit’s newsletter, Larson earned her bachelor’s and master’s in education from Dotham campus of Troy State College, now Troy University, in Alabama.
For four years before being tapped to serve as Hampden Academy principal, Larson was principal at Wasilla Middle School, which is part of the Matanuska‑Susitna Borough School District, located north of Anchorage.
One difference between RSU 22 and her former school district is that faculty and administrators from various schools are able to meet weekly, something that did not happen often in Matanuska-Susitna, which is comprised of 46 schools spread out through a roughly 25,000-square-mile area.
Before that, she was assistant principal at the middle school for one year and assistant principal of Palmer High School in Palmer, Alaska for three years.
She also taught fourth grade and high school world history in Bainbridge, Georgia.
Larson’s annual salary will be $108,000, RSU 22 Superintendent Rick Lyons said earlier. She has signed a two-year contract.