FARMINGTON – A longtime SAD 9 educator and athletic director will become principal of Madison Junior High School starting July 1.
SAD 59 Superintendent Sandra MacArthur said Tuesday that Bonnie Levesque was chosen from among seven or eight candidates to lead the school, which has more than 250 students in grades five through eight.
SAD 59 directors unanimously voted to hire the Farmington woman Monday night, MacArthur said. Besides serving Madison students, the junior high serves students from Athens, Starks and Brighton Plantation in Somerset County.
Levesque said Tuesday she has wanted to be a principal all of her life.
“It has been part of my goal and direction since I started teaching in 1972,” Levesque said. “I knew someday that I was going to be a principal.”
Levesque has spent 28 years in SAD 9, including a stint teaching at the elementary school level and 15 years teaching reading and English at Mt. Blue Middle School before becoming the Mt. Blue High School athletic director, a position she has held for five years. She will start her new position July 1.
“I have a really broad picture of education,” she said. “I’ve taught the young and the old and I’ve been a lifelong learner myself.”
Levesque was involved in the transition of Mt. Blue Junior High to a middle school, and she has an understanding of the middle school philosophy, which is more student-centered, MacArthur said.
She will replace Principal Mark Campbell, who is resigning in June.
Levesque is very energetic and has a very positive attitude, MacArthur said, and she seems to be dedicated to education.
SAD 9 Superintendent Mike Cormier said Levesque has been interested in a principal job for four or five years. She’s been looking within in the district and outside, he said.
Cormier said that in his opinion, the middle school principalship was an “incredibly good fit” for Levesque because she taught at the middle school for so long.
“She really wants to be a building principal,” Cormier said.
Being an athletic director is truly an enormously challenging position, he said.
Levesque is the fourth SAD 9 administrator to announce either a retirement or resignation at the end of the school year. Two veteran elementary principals, Mel Burnham and Paul Gooch, are retiring, and Mt. Blue High School Principal Greg Potter has been hired as the superintendent of School Union 133 in the Windsor area.
Cormier said he is 100 percent supportive of people who have desires to do something different.
Levesque said she plans to meet SAD 59 teachers in June and will be back in August to work with the new SAD 9 athletic director to help that person adjust.
“I’m really excited about it and a little scared,” Levesque said of her new job. “To make changes is a little scary but exciting.”
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