CARIBOU, Maine — Retiring RSU 39 superintendent Frank McElwain has been a teacher, a curriculum coordinator, a vice principal and even Maine’s Teacher of the Year in 1992, but starting August first, the longtime educator will transition full-time into the one thing he’s done longer than teach; farming.
Graduating from the Caribou High School in 1973, McElwain had no intention of becoming a teacher. He studied agriculture at the University of Maine — more specifically, “agricultural mechanization” — but shortly after graduation, he got an interesting call from a former professor asking if he’d consider taking an agriculture teaching position at Mars Hill.
“I tried it out, and,” he said with a knowing chuckle, “I had a lot to learn about teaching. I didn’t have any training or background, and I had a lot to learn about it.”
But there he was, fresh out of college, transplanted into a bare high school classroom in May, told to teach whatever he wanted, with his only resources being a pile of books. At that point, he was the sixth agriculture teacher those students had that year, and one student couldn’t read. Despite the challenges, he returned to Mars Hill that fall and stayed with Mars hill for eight years teaching agriculture.
“The irony of it,” McElwain said about his first foray into teaching, “I became a curriculum coordinator, that was part of my job — and I didn’t know what the word curriculum meant.”
It was a rocky start, but McElwain enjoyed teaching and still does.
“Truly, not to sound cliché, it’s about making relationships with kids and seeing them grow,” the superintendent said.
Even now, when he goes skiing down in Mars Hill, he’ll run into his former students from those first years.
“It’s hard to think they’re 40-something now … or 50,” he said, laughing once more.
After eight years teaching in Mars Hill, McElwain found additional opportunity at the Limestone High School. Not only did it mean teaching closer to his Caribou hometown, it meant forgoing the daily carpool with three other teachers.
“That afforded an opportunity for me to dedicate more time, beyond the teaching day, to the job and it was a good fit,” McElwain said. “I became involved with more teacher-leadership opportunities.”
At Limestone, he became the chair of the science department and was involved with different district initiatives to the extent that, gradually, he began to identify that he had potential to become an administrator.
Specifically, he wanted to become a vocational director because he was teaching vocational courses — but the vocational school was in Caribou. Coincidentally, there was an opening for an assistant principal at the Caribou High School.
“I thought ‘well, I’ll put my name in and at least Caribou will realize that I’m interested in going from teaching to administration;’ I wasn’t anticipating getting that job, or using that job as a stepping stone, because I’d just barely begun taking courses in administration,” McElwain outlined. “But I got hired.”
Being “a little green” administratively, McElwain said that he was fortunate to be the assistant to Caribou Principal David Ouellette.
“I owe a lot to David Ouellette; he was a great mentor and gave me a solid foundation of school administration while I continued with my education and earned my master’s degree,” McElwain said, and remained assistant principal for three years. “He really let me stretch and grow beyond disciplining kids.”
During his time as assistant principal, there were a lot of changes going on in the school that McElwain was able to be a part of — and he enjoyed it. When the superintendent’s office had an opening for a curriculum coordinator, McElwain applied and was hired in 1996.
“It was a time when there was a lot of curriculum work to be done,” he said. In part of his job, he helped implemented curriculum mapping, develop what’s called “common assessments” and had an opportunity to do collaborative work with staff from kindergarten to grade 12. Also during those years, computers were breaking into the scene with new educational standards and challenges — especially since Principal Ouellette had announced that all high school essays were going to be typed.
“Before when I was curriculum coordinator, I remember the goal of the former superintendent was to have a computer on the desk of every teacher, and we thought ‘wow, that would be something,’” McElwain remembered. As curriculum coordinator, McElwain sat down with teachers from Caribou and even Woodland to figure out exactly what computer skills students would need in high school — formatting, typing, spread sheets and the like — and designed the curriculum around those core abilities.
“We had a middle school program for three years to develop those computer skills so that students could, in our minds — at that infant time — hit the ground running in high school,” McElwain said, noting that even just as his time as an administrator, those courses have come and gone as kids know those computer skills at an early age. He’s seen the schools through the days of computer labs to mobile laptop carts that can be wheeled from room to room.
Technology has also allowed some of his endeavors as a curriculum coordinator two decades ago to come full circle — like next month’s implementation of the student-progress monitoring program iObservation that the school unit will be piloting.
“When I was doing that curriculum work, we were looking at the concept of standards and having students be judged on what they know specifically, not with some sort of average,” McElwain explained. “The missing piece was the technology to manage it. We said ‘that will come’ — I didn’t know that would take 15 years, but it is here. And I’m so excited to see it come to fruition.”
Being the district’s curriculum coordinator was a facet of McElwain’s educational career that he found to be very rewarding.
“Working with staff, working with curriculum and helping teachers become better teachers was something I was very interested in doing, and enjoy doing and would have continued doing — until the superintendent’s seat opened up,” he said. He’s been superintendent for the past 12 years — but he still vividly remembers his first days entering education.
“I can just see myself walking down that hall in Mars Hill and having no clue, opening the door to this room with all these kids, one of the kids can’t read, box of books in the corner … let’s take out the books? It was a horror show really, I hate to say it,” he said. “But Mars Hill was patient with me and supported me and encouraged me to come back and to grow. It worked out well, and it was fun.”
Picking out a favorite title of his career is difficult, but McElwain narrowed it down to two:
“In a lot of ways, the teaching part was the best part; beyond that, the best job was curriculum coordinator — all the staff, and helping to implement new programming,” he said, listing a ground-breaking math course, the technology components and a foreign language program that introduced youths to French starting in first grade.
“I don’t think anyone could have foreseen the impact of technology,” he admitted, but he did have a heads-up on the Internet well before most.
Back in his Mars Hill days, the school had two computers in a room that were only being used by the gifted students, who worked to figure out how to write their own programs to make the computer do basic things like crunch numbers. But McElwain was introduced to an opportunity through the teacher’s organization to do a pilot program called AgriData.
“Forget what you know about the Internet — there was no such thing as the Internet,” he prefaced. The idea was that Mars Hill had two computers in the isolated gifted rooms, and if they used this piece of equipment called a modem, they could get their computer to talk with other computers in places like Ohio or even Russia.
“You could get the latest crop conditions or you could even get the breaking agriculture news, or lesson ideas from other agriculture teachers,” he outlined.
McElwain volunteered to be the pilot for the state of Maine and was sent a modem, which had to be plugged into the landline phone jack. Students would have to use a flipchart to get the absolute correct combination of keystrokes to call the central computer, and then another set of keystrokes could call in the data from another computer
“But you had to get the keystrokes just right,” he explained.
The story does have a comedic twist.
McElwain and his students set up the computer and went through the time-consuming process of entering the keystrokes and followed the guidelines to the letter, but they couldn’t get the computer to work.
They tried the same process for days until it dawned on him.
“The call we were making from the computer was long distance. Mars Hill at the time had only operator-assisted long distance … where you would dial the number, the operator would come on line, you would state where you were trying to call and the operator would connect you,” McElwain said. As the computer was hooked up to the phone line, the operator’s question as to where the call needed to be place would have only been answered by a screeching modem in her ear.
“I can imagine all the times kept trying it and trying it,” McElwain said, sounding apologetic toward the operator.
The class did finally connect with the other computers to print these agricultural reports. It was a pretty ground-breaking experience for the kids in Mars Hill to get a printout of something from Russia 30 years ago during the Cold War.
“I tell this story and (Assistant Superintendent Lois Brewer) makes fun of me, claiming that I invented the Internet,” McElwain said.
Though McElwain has had the opportunity to work with tremendous colleagues and memorable students in a very rewarding career, he is retiring from education at the end of the month and becoming a third-generation full-time farmer.
McElwain and his dad partnered on a strawberry enterprise in 1985, which is where McElwain plans to spend his retirement.
“Part of it was to work with my dad during that era, and part to get the kids involved with farming and give them some work ethic and experience,” he explained.
While much different than education, there are many aspects of farming that the superintendent enjoys.
“I like that it’s physically challenging, it keeps you mentally on your toes because there’s a lot to think about, and it’s intrinsically rewarding because there’s tangible accomplishments of what you’ve done that day, or what you’ve made, or what you’ve grown,” he said.
Come fall, McElwain admits it will be difficult to be on the outside of the educational realm for the first time in four decades but noted that retiring as superintendent is a little easier knowing that the incoming superintendent is more than ready for the job.
“(New Superintendent Sue White) is a Caribou person, she’s connected in different ways to the community and has been for years, she’s come up through and taught in the system, she’s been a successful administrator, continued her education and has multiple roles in the school system — she’s just very good,” he said, acknowledging that he could continue listing positive attributes about White because he knows her well, he’s seen her and frankly, he’s proud of her. “It is comforting leaving a career and a job that you’ve enjoyed, and to leave it in the hands of somebody who is so capable makes it that much easier,” he added.
