Pembroke Academy Headmaster to depart, citing budget woes as a factor

Pembroke Academy as seen on April, 2, 2016. (ELIZABETH FRANTZ / Monitor staff)

Pembroke Academy as seen on April, 2, 2016. (ELIZABETH FRANTZ / Monitor staff) Elizabeth Frantz

By JEREMY MARGOLIS

Monitor staff

Published: 12-17-2024 2:49 PM

Modified: 12-17-2024 4:47 PM


Longtime educator Dan Morris will step down as headmaster of Pembroke Academy at the end of this school year, he announced earlier this month.

The fallout from voters’ $3 million cut to the proposed school budget contributed to his decision to leave, Morris said in an interview Tuesday.

“We had, I believe, 20 staff members who left from last year to this year,” Morris said. “…That is turnover that I have never seen in my time in Pembroke. Part of that is a tremendous increased workload on the staff and the administration to fill those positions. This summer was very challenging for us to do that.”

Morris is the second school leader in the district to announce his departure since the budget decision last March. In June, Three Rivers School principal Bill McCarthy resigned after just one year in the job, citing personal reasons, and his position is currently being filled on an interim basis.

“I think anytime someone has personal reasons for leaving, I respect that,” Superintendent Patty Sherman said in an interview Tuesday. “We’ll conduct a search and hopefully find a good candidate” for both positions.

Morris will leave behind a decades-long legacy as a student and educator in the Pembroke schools. He graduated from Pembroke Academy in 1998 and returned after college, first working as a long-term substitute and then as a seventh-grade teacher at Three Rivers.

In 2013, Morris became an administrator, serving as the assistant principal at Three Rivers, followed by a stint as the curriculum director at Pembroke Academy. In 2020, he became the headmaster at Pembroke Academy.

Sherman characterized Morris’s departure as a “huge loss” for the high school and expressed gratitude for the leadership role he has played over more than two decades.

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“I think it was clear early on in Dr. Morris’s career that he would be moving up in the district, and he has always been a consummate professional, very bright, very easy to work with,” Sherman said. “One of the things that I admire most about him is his loyalty and his desire to put the needs of the students first in any decision that he makes.”

Morris said the school budget woes were just one factor behind his decision to leave. He also cited a desire to regain a healthier quality of life that is difficult to maintain amid the demanding hours and stress of being a high school principal. 

“It’s a very challenging job, and I think I'm ready to try something different,” he said.

Morris said he has some ideas about what he wants to do next but is holding off on sharing them. He is not sure whether his next pursuit will be in the realm of education.

Voters’ decision last March to trim $3 million, or 10%, from a proposed budget for this school year, led to the elimination of 27 positions across the district’s three schools, including nine at the high school. Many educators quit because of the uncertainty.

“The week following the school district meeting, I wrote over 10 letters of recommendation for staff who were really concerned about what the future was going to look like,” Morris said.

The departures have stretched teachers and administrators thin and eliminated certain educational opportunities for students at Pembroke Academy, including in science and world languages.

Because school districts in New Hampshire primarily rely on local property taxes for funding, the choices voters make at annual school meetings can have significant effects.

“I just think we’re reaching a point of reckoning in this state with how we fund public education,” Morris said. “And that needs to be seriously looked at.”

Morris said that both living and working in town in the midst of the budget controversy has at times been a challenge.

“People are going to make their own choices based on their own factors and I respect that,” Morris said. “What I have a problem with is when people talk about that we don't know what we're doing or we're inept when it has way more to do with the funding model than it does with anything that we're doing here in Pembroke.”

Morris, who became principal in the midst of the pandemic, said his proudest moment in that role was when Pembroke Academy was named the Secondary School of Excellence in New Hampshire for the 2022-23 school year.

Sherman said she hopes to post job openings within the next week for both the positions Morris and McCarthy are vacating but she expects it will be difficult to fill them.

“I don't necessarily attribute it to the budget cuts, but there is absolutely a shortage of administrators in the state,” she said.

The Pembroke School Board was set to discuss launching a search for the Pembroke Academy headmaster position at its meeting on Tuesday.

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.