TURNER – Patrick Hartnett avoids the stereotype of a high school principal: a stuffy guy in a suit who knows only the overachievers and the underperformers.

“I think that being able to engage the students, in the classroom or in the halls or the cafeteria, helps make me a better principal,” he says. “If I am separated from them, why am I here?”

It’s an attitude that has won Hartnett – Leavitt Area High School’s principal for five years – increasing praise. On Wednesday, it won him the title of Maine’s High School Principal of the Year.

The presentation was made at a morning assembly, accompanied by 700 congratulatory student cheers and 1,400 stomping student feet.

“Stand up and shout all you wish,” said South Portland High School Principal Jeanne Crocker, who led the selection committee that picked Hartnett.

When his time came, Hartnett said he felt like a baseball MVP, selected as a most valuable player by the Maine Principals’ Association.

“You are my team,” he told the gathered teens.

Richard Durost, the principals’ association executive director, gave Hartnett the news late Monday. Word of the choice spread to his assistant principals and a few other staffers.

For most students and faculty, the presentation was a surprise. Kids knew something was brewing as they filed into the gymnasium, where they spotted cameras.

“Somebody’s getting a Nobel prize,” one quipped.

Several minutes later, Durost made the announcement and Hartnett’s family – his wife, Tracey, and their children Hannah, 9; Margaret, 6; and Thomas, 5 – appeared with a bouquet of flowers and a bunch of green-and-white balloons.

The family was still deciding how best to celebrate the honor, Principal Hartnett said.

He was chosen from 153 public and private school principals across Maine. Durost declined to say how many were nominated, only that Hartnett was pulled from a “very robust pool.”

The pool included new nominees and people who were repeats from prior years.

Hartnett, a native of Harrison, stood out from the pack with his service in and out of school, Crocker said.

Outside his own school, Hartnett has belonged to the principals’ association curriculum and instruction committee and the boards for the Androscoggin College for ME program and the Lewiston Regional Technical Center.

His career has been building since the early 1990s.

A 1993 graduate of the University of Maine, Hartnett earned a master’s degree in educational leadership from the University of Southern Maine the following year.

In 1994, he began a six-year stint as a U.S. history teacher at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in Paris. In 2000, he was promoted to assistant principal. In 2004, he moved on to Leavitt Area High School as principal.

“You grow into the job,” Hartnett said. “There are lots of times when you say, ‘That wasn’t in the manual.'”

Trying to engage students came out of his belief that everyone ought to feel a sense of belonging. It doesn’t happen without genuine interest from leadership, he said.

Among his works: a weekly pizza lunch with randomly selected seniors to talk about whatever’s on their minds.

“I hope they enjoy it,” he said. “I enjoy it.”

Richelle Ramsey, a junior from Leeds who watched the assembly from the gym bleachers, said she was happy for Hartnett.

His efforts to engage kids is appreciated, she said. “He actually cares about the students as individuals.”

Another Leavitt Area High School principal, Nelson Beaudoin, received the Principal of the Year Award in 2000, making the school the only one in Maine in at least the past 18 years to have two award-winning principals.