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A longtime Bangor School Department employee will take the helm in Brewer this summer.
Dan Chadbourne will officially become the superintendent at Brewer School Department on July 1, replacing Gregg Palmer in the role. But Chadbourne’s been working in the position since January while continuing to work as the director of pupil services for the Bangor schools.
It’s an unusual transition — six months of the incoming and outgoing superintendents working together — but the slow handoff is designed to allow Chadbourne and Palmer to share ideas about what has worked in the past and what the future holds.
Palmer will retire June 30, after nearly seven years in the role.
“Our school committee wanted somebody whose reputation they knew,” Palmer said. “We all wanted a long time to do this transition.”
Chadbourne interviewed for the position in fall 2025 and was officially hired in early 2026.
“It didn’t take long for me sitting there in the first interview to realize everything I’ve worked towards has gotten me to the place where I need to be, and that’s right here, right now for the Brewer community,” Chadbourne said.
Chadbourne joined Bangor schools in 2009, working as a special education teacher. In the years after he worked as a vice principal, principal and athletic director across the district.
Switching to a district in a rival town isn’t a hard switch, he said. It felt “really natural” to wear Brewer’s orange and black at a unified Bangor-Brewer hockey game this past winter. Chadbourne said he believes in students and that doesn’t change with a new district.
“The integrity that I carry won’t change,” Chadbourne said. “The ZIP code might but that’s OK.”
Being a superintendent is about doing what’s best for the student, and Brewer has excelled at focusing on what each student needs, Chadbourne said. It is about “meeting students where they’re at and differentiating for them so that you can maximize the potential,” he said.
This is Chadbourne’s first time as superintendent and he said he’s sure there will be unforeseen challenges. When that happens, his approach will be to collaborate with people in the department, he said.
“It would be foolish to think that we wouldn’t want to leverage those resources and work together to hear each other’s different perspectives, different sides of the story, to come to a common solution which ultimately should be what’s best for the student,” Chadbourne said.
He believes that all students have the ability to succeed. There were teachers and coaches who ensured he stayed on the right path when he was growing up, and that’s what he wants for kids in Brewer.
“I want people to have that enthusiasm that every single day you can change the world,” Chadbourne said. “You really can if you believe it. If you show up and you work hard for [students], great things are going to come.”