HARTFORD — The School District has identified three Vermont educators as candidates for the next principal at Hartford High School.
A search committee is in the process of identifying the successor to retiring Hartford High School Principal Nelson Fogg.
The three candidates are Amy Molina, an assistant principal at U-32 Middle & High School in East Montpelier, Kelly O’Ryan, principal of Bellows Falls High School and Melissa Wyman, an English teacher at Hartford High School. They were chosen from a pool of 13 applicants, Superintendent Caty Sutton said Thursday.
The candidates introduced themselves and answered community questions at a Tuesday night community forum at the Hartford Area Career and Technical Center that had about a dozen in-person attendees and more online, according to a recording. The public forum was the last of several meetings held that day with different stakeholder groups including students, staff and administrators.
The school district sought candidates who are “innovative, committed to collaborative leadership, accessible, flexible, and excited about the unique opportunities that our high school offers,” according to a job description. The annual salary range is between $91,000 to $140,000.
All three candidates emphasized the importance of supporting students as whole humans and creating pathways to success that go beyond academic achievement.
Amy Molina has been at U-32 Middle & High School for 25 years, she said in a recording of the forum.
If she is hired as principal, Molina said she will not come in with a preexisting “vision” for the High School and instead will focus on listening. She hopes to learn what is special and successful about Hartford High School to continue to support those programs and identify any tweaks she might be able to make to help the school and community thrive, she said at the forum.
Molina said she prefers to work early in the morning and into the evening so that she can spend the day engaging with students and teachers. She believes building relationships is paramount to the job as well as valuing the whole student and fostering a sense of inclusion and belonging.
There are also many similarities, Molina said, between Hartford and U-32, including a wide range of socioeconomic diversity.
“I think that a school should be the great equalizer, and we’re not lowering the bar, we’re raising the bar for everybody,” Molina said.
O’Ryan, of Putney, Vt., is currently in her third year as principal at Bellows Falls Union High School and lives with her husband and three children. In school administration work, O’Ryan said she “lead(s) through that lens” of being a parent.
Before becoming principal, O’Ryan served as equity and Title IX coordinator for the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union. Before coming to Bellows Falls, O’Ryan worked as dean of students and director of equity at Landmark College in Putney, a college exclusively for neurodivergent students, and a teacher at the Greenwood School, a private school also for students with learning differences.
O’Ryan’s experience working with students with learning differences has informed her career and approach to education.
“I have always worked very hard to center youth voices, I think that that is critical to having a healthy community,” O’Ryan said. She is also a “lifelong restorative practices practitioner” in terms of conduct and discipline systems.
There are many similarities between the smaller 300-student Bellows Falls Union High School and Hartford, which has about 500 students, including dealing with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, in school buildings, O’Ryan said. Bellows Falls Union High School has completed over $10 million in PCB-related and infrastructure renovations over three years and has had to navigate continuing to operate with limited resources.
O’Ryan, like Molina, said she would not come to Hartford with an eye to creating change for no particular reason and instead would help to promote and continue the goals and systems that are already in place. As an administrator, she said a primary goal would be helping to understand and communicate the often complicated changes and pressures on the district from Montpelier.
Melissa Wyman, of Hartland, is currently an English teacher at Hartford High School. She has worked in the district for 15 years as a teacher, dean of curriculum instruction and assessment and as a faculty coach. Wyman grew up in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire and attended the University of Vermont. She comes from a family of public educators.
Wyman is a strong proponent of “place-based education,” or integrating the local community and environment into education. The Vermont-based Rowland Foundation awarded her with a fellowship in 2024. She is working on a project to add place-based principles to classes across disciplines at the high school and would continue this effort as principal.
Being from Hartland, which sends some students to Hartford, Wyman said she can add that perspective to the leadership of the school.
“It’s really important to make sure that we have entry ramps and pathways for all of the students who walk through our door,” Wyman said.
As principal, Wyman would also focus on implementing universal supports across the high school for students who may be struggling in school or in their personal lives even if their challenges are not obvious.
“We never know what our kids are carrying, and yet as a school we have to create doors for them every time they walk through,” Wyman said. “And every time they show up it’s an invitation and an opportunity to access their education.”
The district asked attendees at Tuesday’s forum to complete a survey to help inform the hiring decision. Attendees gauged each candidate’s concern for different categories such as leadership and decision-making, fairness and professionalism, and alignment with the high school’s “needs and visions,” identified strengths or concerns for each candidate and rated how much attendees would recommend each candidate for the job.
A search committee has finished reviewing the community feedback as well as interview notes, resumes, reference letters and more, Sutton said. She expects to announce a finalist by next week.