By Natalie Bazinet
Staff Writer
CASWELL — The Dawn F. Barnes Elementary School in Caswell had undergone a couple of changes since last year, like the addition of some new walls and a new teaching principal overseeing the school.
Aroostook Republican photo/Natalie Bazinet
Teaching principal at the Dawn F. Barnes Elementary School in Caswell Christina Davenport reads to her students their spelling words, she used the opportunity to share a laugh with her students. “Photogenic,” she read off of the spelling list, “as in, I hope I look photogenic in these pictures.” As a teaching principal, Davenport not only educates fourth- and fifth-grade students like Abby Moore and Kayla Martin, shown in front, she is also responsible for the school’s administrative duties.
Before retiring last year, then-teaching principal Charles Hartman approached the fourth- and fifth-grade teacher Christina Davenport and urged her to apply for the teaching principal position as he was retiring, as she recalled.
Davenport, of Westfield, has been teaching at the small school for the past five years; it was announced at the end of last school year that she’d be taking the helm at the school as the new teaching principal.
With the position comes a unique set of challenges, and teaching principals are few and far between in recent times. But Davenport takes the position’s inherent difficulties in stride.
“I like the challenge of having to organize my time,” she said, mentioning she also likes that students can look to her with help for their problems as both a teacher and a principal.
“They can come to me with any problems and we can hopefully fix it,” she said.
The Caswell school is a unique learning environment with a low student-to-teacher ration and resultantly, disciplinary offenses are low. But new to the school this year is a strict adherence to the code of conduct that students are sent home with at the beginning of each year.
“We all follow the same set of rules with the same set of consequences,” she explained.
Davenport teaches fourth- and fifth-grade language arts as well as math to students in grades four through eight. The school currently has 41 students from pre-K to grade eight.
Davenport is currently enrolled at the University of Maine at Orono and is slated to graduate in 2013 with her master’s degree, with an elective focus on the teaching principal curriculum.
The Caswell school will be hosting one of their famed Literacy Nights on Wednesday, Oct. 12.
The event will feature a pumpkin theme, with activities centered around very autumn activities like making cookies and decorating pumpkins.
Literacy Night will be held from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Additional information can be obtained by calling 325-4611.
