ORFORD — Students in the Rivendell Interstate School District will see an unusual number of new teachers, along with some familiar educators in different roles, come September.

Out of 23 staff members either leaving or retiring from the district, 17 worked at the district’s elementary schools in Fairlee and Vershire.

“It’s the largest turnover I’ve seen in my nine years on the board,” Kathy Hooke, a Vershire representative on the Rivendell School Board, said on Wednesday night. “We didn’t have anybody leave two years ago and maybe one or two last year.

“This is a big convergence in a small set of schools.”

Email, phone and Facebook messages left for several parents and current teachers in the district, including union president and elementary-school reading Barbara Griffin, were not returned on Thursday.

The changes in the trenches come on top of the recent hirings of a new district superintendent and principals at each of the elementary schools.

The new superintendent, Oxbow High School graduate and longtime Sharon Elementary School Principal Barrett Williams, starts work on Monday. Asked about the turnover, Williams said in an email that “the hiring committee for the Samuel Morey and Westshire schools have gone above and beyond in an effort to fill any and all open positions.”

Hooke, whose son attended both elementary schools and will start grade 9 at Rivendell Academy in the fall, said she has heard little alarm from Vershire and West Fairlee residents. She added that while she doesn’t believe the departures at Samuel Morey in particular indicate a system in trouble, “it isa lot of people.”

The Samuel Morey Elementary in Fairlee teaches about 180 children in pre-K through grade 6, including Orford and Fairlee’s pre-K to grade 4 population.

“From a parent’s perspective, I can understand some of them going, ‘Whoa! What’s going on here?’ ”

Hooke pointed to a wide variety of reasons for the departures, including five outright retirements from the elementary classrooms. Two teachers, both with the district since its founding in 2000, retired from Westshire, and Samuel Morey lost a special education teacher with 26 years of experience and a longtime paraeducator in special education.

Also, the art teacher covering both elementary schools, who had taken leave this past academic year to care for an ailing family member, decided to retire, and the teacher who substituted for her will stay in that position, Hooke said. Fourth-grade teacher Leah Wolk-Derksen, who missed much of 2018-2019 at Samuel Morey with illnesses related to her reaction to mold in the 1950s-era building and could not get paid sick leave after using up her quota, is not returning.

Other changes at Samuel Morey include two teachers taking maternity leave, one possibly for the full year, as well as a “mid-career” teacher with young children leaving “very much for family reasons” and a science teacher taking a position at Thetford Academy at the high school level. That teacher, Hooke said, “left with great ambivalence.”

As with the art teacher covering both elementary schools, the physical education teacher doing double duty moved out of the district and will be replaced by a Rivendell Academy graduate who “knows all the kids and is thrilled to get that job,” Hooke said. “It’s definitely going to be a year of transition.”

Taking the helm for the transition at the elementary level will be Steven Lindemann at Samuel Morey and Timm Judas at Westshire. The district had experimented with floating one principal and one vice principal among the two schools.

“The model was brand-new, and we found that it didn’t work well,” said Orford resident Tami Sullivan, mother of two students at Samuel Morey and president of the district’s Parent Teacher Organization. “I’m really hoping that returning to this format is going to be a springboard for the district to move forward.”

David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.