SALEM – Mt. Abram High School principal, Jeanne Tucker, has been named Maine’s High School Principal of the Year by the Maine Principal’s Association.

Based on her accomplishments as an educational leader, the MPA announced its choice of Tucker for the award on Friday.

“Tucker’s professionalism; leadership of high school reform, which includes meaningful opportunities for students, parents and staff to have an active voice in their school; and a commitment to a rigorous college preparatory curriculum for every student, represent the very best qualities of a 21st-century high school principal in Maine. She is, without doubt, a leader in the profession,” said MPA Executive Director Richard Durost.

With the award, MPA recognizes her abilities as a leader in areas of collaborative leadership; curriculum, instruction and assessment; personalization of learning and contributions to the profession, as stated in the announcement.

“It’s certainly a special honor,” Tucker said Friday. “This is a recognition by my peers. There are so many respected principals in Maine and to be singled out by them is very humbling.”

Tucker has led the school through the principles of a program, Promising Future, that guides practices for improving high schools and making them more student-centered, she said. Those practices level the playing field for all kids, help them realize goals and work in a more student-centered fashion.

The high school has adopted a one-to-one laptop program which provides every ninth grade student an Apple MacBook. All 25 teachers also have a laptop to work with the school’s 315 students, she said.

“It’s a real incentive for students to become skillful in technology, and it’s a real leveler,” she said. The 40-year-old school is totally wireless, she added.

Tucker explains the commitment by the school staff to provide an equitable, rigorous and personalized education for all students in a “Principal Message” located on the school’s Web site.

Instruction that is equal, by allowing different students to meet the same high learning standards in different ways; rigorous, in that it asks students to rise to higher levels of thinking and analysis, in order to prepare every Mt. Abram graduate for college-level studies; and personal, as students are supported but expected to take charge of their own learning through goal setting, self-assessment and demonstration that they are working on the goals they have set for themselves.

“Tucker is very deserving,” said SAD 58 Superintendent Quenten Clark Friday. “I’ve thought so for a long time. She’s the best principal in the state and a wonderful educator. It’s easy to be superintendent if you hire Jeanne Tucker to be principal.”

Tucker will be honored as Maine’s 2008 High School Principal of the Year at the MPA’s Spring Conference awards banquet on May 1. She will travel to Washington, D.C., in October where the 2008 state principals will be honored and she will also be eligible for consideration as the 2008 National Principal of the Year.

The award was announced at the school Friday afternoon. During the assembly, Tucker said she made it clear that any recognition of her leadership was an acknowledgment of the teachers at Mt. Abram

“We’re a real team and it’s a tribute to them,” she said.

Prior to her appointment as principal of Mt. Abram High School in 2000, she was a biology teacher from 1979 to 2000 at the school. She also taught biology in Massachusetts from 1971-1979.

She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in biology from Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts and a Master of Education degree from Cambridge College in 1990.