POWNAL – Sitting in her office last week as summer vacation drew to a close, Pownal Elementary School Principal Lisa Demick, who is in her third year at the school (she had previously taught in Cumberland), is excited about the start of another school year.

She has company in the office as the school’s mascot, Vinny the turtle, sits on a rock in his tank waiting for the kids to come back.

Demick, 50, who lives in Cumberland and has a son at Southern Maine Community College and a daughter who is a junior at Greely High School, is also the math strategist for the Regional School Unit 5 district in works with teachers to help develop math programs. Demick oversees a school that a University of Southern Maine’s Center for Education Policy, Applied Research, and Evaluation, study found scored the highest in the district in meeting the criteria for a more efficient school. Demick said the small size of the school and the nature of the town are a major factor in the school’s success, as well.

“I would say Pownal has a long history of good academic results,” Demick said. “One of the things that plays into our high student achievement is that we have smaller class sizes than many schools. Eighteen is our largest class size.”

Demick recently took a few minutes to talk about the start of the new school year, which began Tuesday.

Q: What brought you to Pownal and RSU 5?

A: The position was crafted as a principal/math strategist and I was ready to step into a (principal’s position). I have 25 years of teaching experience, so I wanted to be in a place where instructional leadership was the majority of the job and I could be in the classroom every day. I know every one of these students and I can stay connected to high quality teaching and learning. I didn’t want to be the manager of a giant corporation. I want to affect kids’ education.

Q: What is your favorite thing about being principal of Pownal Elementary School?

A: The students, the families and the teachers and the personalization (of a small school). This is a place where everyone looks out for each other and all work together for the greater good. It’s a wonderful place to be.

Q: What’s going to be new for the kids when they come back to school?

A: We got all new carpeting over the summer in all the classrooms. We’re also going to have a new focus on science. We’re going to continue to work on our readers’ workshop initiative and we’re going to add some professional development around science. But I think the kids are going to be the most excited about the new carpets.

Q: Is there anything exciting planned for the first couple of days of school?

A: It’s going to be about celebrating the things that we offered over the summer, the reading program and we also did the math Summer Olympics that I offered to all of the kids of the district, so they’re going to get to shine because of the work they did around that. And were going to celebrate about being all back together. One of the things in a small school like this is we work hard to make sure that the social tone is really high, because we want everyone to feel like they can take risks and we want everyone to feel that they belong here. So every year it’s about re-establishing that positive tone, so that we are treating each other with respect.

Q: What did you do over your summer vacation?

A: I only took Fridays off. People don’t know that principals work all summer, so I only took Fridays off and I did that so I wouldn’t dig into too many projects at home or get embroiled with all of those kind of things. But that (taking Fridays off) made it so I could catch up on some things I wanted to do here and still feel like I was renewing and getting to relax and doing lots of reading.

Lisa Demick this week began her third year as principal of Pownal Elementary School, where students and staff are celebrating “being all back together.”