Elaine Collins will become the superintendent of the North Country Supervisory Union on July 1, taking over for departing superintendent John Castle. “I’m excited for the challenge, and I’ll try to lead from the heart,” she said. However, she also thinks that “the work that needs to happen probably for the remainder of my career is the path out of the pandemic.”
Collins is a native of Irasburg, Vermont. “I’m a Northeast Kingdom girl,” she said. “I’ve lived here my whole life.” Collins has worked for 32 years as a teacher and principal before getting the job as the new superintendent. She is currently the principal of Newport City Elementary.
Current Superintendent Castle is leaving in order to become the executive director of the Vermont Rural Education Collaborative. By the time he steps down in the summer, Castle will have been the superintendent for eight years.
According to CNN, the average tenure for a superintendent is five or six years, but because of Covid, superintendents are serving for even shorter periods. According to a survey by the National Superintendents Roundtable, “nearly two-thirds of the superintendents who responded considered quitting during the 2020-2021 school year.”
Castle says he has “worked very closely” with Collins since she’s become the principal of Newport City Elementary. “We're very fortunate to have her come to our supervisory union, she's providing outstanding leadership to Newport City, I would say transformational,” he said.
“John Castle has been an exceptional superintendent,” said Collins, “so it’s big shoes to fill.”
Collins was in foster care when she was a child, and later she and her husband were foster parents. “My desire to pay it forward and help kids who might have more challenging backgrounds was really what led me into teaching,” she said. She said that at Newport City Elementary, she has been helping kids “build natural resilience for challenging circumstances.”
Superintendent Castle said that Covid “has certainly made the job more challenging. There are many polarized views of certain mitigation efforts, like masking.” Castle has spent a lot of time trying to coordinate Covid mitigation protocols across the different schools in the Supervisory Union.
Collins thinks she will be working on Covid-related issues for the rest of her career. For example, many children are not at the level they should be at, because the pandemic has disrupted their education. “Where should those learning targets be for those kids who have had some inconsistent instruction through no fault of their own?” she said.
For now, Collins is focusing on “figuring out a way to recover or heal from this stasis that we've been in for the last two or two and a half years.”
