Barrington — During the Thursday, January 16, Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee meeting, Superintendent Peter Dillon announced that the district extended the contract for Jake McCandless, principal of W.E.B. Du Bois Middle School, through June 2028.
Previous Middle School Principal Miles Wheat left at the end of the 2023–24 school year, as did the district’s two other school principals.
McCandless, who has had a career in education spanning more than 30 years, earned a bachelor’s degree in literature and communications at Grove City College in Grove City, Penn. He received a master’s degree from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va., and then a doctorate in educational leadership from Boston College.
McCandless has served as the principal of Lee Middle and High School, the superintendent of the Lee School District, the superintendent of the Pittsfield School District, and most recently as the superintendent of the Mount Greylock Regional School District.
“To me, there’s nothing more important than what happens in a school classroom,” McCandless told The Berkshire Edge in an interview last year. “If you were completing an organizational chart from the most important, crucial people in the building of a child’s daily life, the custodians, the cafeteria workers, the paraprofessionals, and the teachers, would all be well above the principal and the assistant principal. Our work is to support the work of everybody else to make their jobs easier, more efficient, and better, and to help them better understand their work if the need is there. I felt that—early on in my career, I felt a need to be more involved in the systems and support of helping great teachers do their work, rather than digging in and becoming a great teacher myself. I decided to put my energy and my efforts into supporting individual people and supporting systems that hopefully make schools work as well as they can for young people, and for the people we’re all here to serve.”
According to the fiscal 2025 budget adopted by the school district, McCandless’s salary is listed as $111,000 this school year.
Details about McCandless’s salary over the next three years, along with other terms of his contract, were not disclosed by the district at press time.
Update: In an email to The Berkshire Edge after this story was published, Dillon wrote that McCandless’s salary is $135,000 for this current school year.
Dillon added that the school district is working on details of McCandless’s contract and that the district will share further details when completed.
