After 10 years as the principal of Nobleboro Central School, Mark Deblois announced his retirement last month. Deblois, 58, will step down from his position at the end of the school year.
Deblois will begin work as the principal at the Lincoln Akerman School in Hampton Falls, N.H., next fall.
“I’m really going to miss him,” said AOS 93 Superintendent Bob Bouchard. “He’s really moved NCS along. It’s a solid school with a staff that works well together, and a lot of that can be credited to his leadership.”
“It’s another opportunity to direct the skills I’ve developed over the years at a new school,” Deblois said. “It’s also a nice financial boost.”
Fortunately for Deblois, after 35 years in Maine education, he qualifies for state retirement benefits. “It’s called the classic double dip,” he said.
Under Maine law, teachers and school administrators that have worked in the state for long enough can retire and begin receiving benefits, even if they subsequently take a position in an out-of-state school system.
“There are certain disadvantages to starting out as a teacher,” Deblois said. “This is a perk if you stay for a while.”
When Deblois was studying elementary education at the University of Southern Maine, those disadvantages didn’t stop him from falling in love with teaching from the first moment he stepped in a classroom.
His junior year, he had an internship that allowed him to teach in a classroom at Kennebunkport Consolidated School. After that experience, he nearly dropped out of school to teach in Canada, he said. At that time, Canadian schools only required three years of college to get a teaching certificate.
What sold him on teaching was seeing the effect he could have on students. “The beauty of that internship was being there with the kids everyday and seeing yourself in that role,” he said. “As a teacher, you saw what education could be.”
He finished his bachelor’s degree at USM and took a job at Brunswick Junior High School teaching sixth-grade language arts and reading and then eighth-grade language arts and reading.
In his fifth year at BJHS, Deblois had a “really tough group of kids,” he said. “My first pregnant teenager was in that class.”
Deblois didn’t think the standard school format worked for these kids, and he received permission to take 25 of them and form a new program in which he taught them for half of each school day.
“I realized that I was doing a lot more counseling than teaching,” Deblois said.
Looking back, Deblois now realizes that what he created was one of the first attempts at an alternative education program. Today, almost every school has some form of alternative education option.
From that experience, Deblois realized that helping kids get into the right frame of mind for school was what he excelled at and what he really loved to do.
He went back to USM and earned a master’s degree in counseling. When he completed that program, he took a job as the director of guidance at Wiscasset High School – a position he would keep for the next 20 years.
“There were always new things going on there,” Deblois said. Deblois was part of the creation of one of the first block schedules in a high school and several other programs that are still used at WHS and schools around the state.
After his tenure at WHS, he was offered the principal’s position at NCS. He viewed the move as a return to his roots in elementary schools, but with the added challenges that come with being principal.
As with his upcoming move to Lincoln Akerman (interestingly, that school is also known as LA), the difficulties of the new position are what made the move to NCS exciting.
“I’m not daunted by challenges,” he said. “It’s satisfying to be a part of solutions.”
Bouchard thinks that Deblois is more than qualified to handle any problems at LA.
“Hampton Falls is getting someone who’s a solid principal at the top of his game,” Bouchard said.
Over the last few years, NCS’s state funding has been cut from about $660,000 per year to almost $0, “and we didn’t spend a lot of time whining,” Deblois said.
NCS has continued to grow their academic programs, even as their budgets shrank, Deblois said. “We’re very proud that we’ve been able to decrease our budget the last two years, and keep a comprehensive education program.”
When Deblois started at NCS, the school was not making adequate yearly progress in reading or math, as measured by standardized testing. Through a rigorous literacy program, 75 percent of NCS students are now in the top two categories on the NECAP tests for literacy, and the school as a whole is above the state average.
“Math improvement will have to be left for the new principal,” Deblois said.
On June 3, NCS hired Ann Hassett to take over as principal. Hassett is the Medomak Valley High School assistant principal, and has worked in education for almost 20 years, Bouchard said.
