Great Barrington — The new school year for students of W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School starts on Wednesday, August 28. While he was not around the school district at the time, new school Principal Jason “Jake” McCandless followed the news about the controversial police investigation of former eighth grade ELA teacher Arantzazú Zuzene Galdós-Shapiro for allegedly having a copy of the book “Gender Queer” in her classroom. “There were some unique challenges that this school experienced last year,” McCandless told The Berkshire Edge. “I think that it will be a challenge to help this faculty move forward through another 180-day school year for the good of the children while trying to help them recover from an event that jarred them, and hurt them to some degree. We need to keep building community partnerships so, during difficult times, we can have hard conversations that remain fruitful for children, for families, and for the community.”
McCandless said he is ready to take on the challenges of the new school year.
The school’s previous principal, Miles Wheat, announced in late April that he would be taking a job as the new principal of Chatham High School in New York after serving one year at W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School.
McCandless grew up in western Pennsylvania and said, “from my first day of school in Kindergarten to about the ninth or 10th grade, I was completely locked on what I wanted to do with my career.”
“I wanted to be to young people what my teachers had been to me,” McCandless said. “The satisfaction for me comes from just knowing that I’m getting to impact the lives of young people in a good way on a daily basis and hopefully impacting the community in a good way.”
McCandless is now in his 31st year working in education.
McCandless 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.
He started his career in education as an English teacher in Mineral, Va., before he and his family eventually moved up to the Berkshires. “Our family lived just outside of Charlottesville, Va., and at the time, I was an assistant principal in a county-wide school system at a high school with about 1,400 students,” McCandless said. “At the time, we had a two-year-old and a three-year-old. But what we didn’t have was a relative within four or five hours from us. That is why I started looking for jobs where my wife grew up, which was near Hartford, Conn. We set ourselves within a 100-mile radius from where her family was.”
Over time. 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 said. “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.”
McCandless emphasized that one of his priorities for this school year is to ensure that the school community is a community of inclusiveness. “I want students to know that my priority for them is that they know that they belong here, every single one of them,” McCandless said. “We support who they are and who they are in the process of becoming an adult. At the end of the day, every single grown-up in this building has one mission, and that is to make sure that those young people all come to school in a safe, friendly, loving environment where they can become what they aspire to be.”
McCandless had a similar message for the families of the school children. “I would like all of the parents and guardians of the school children [to know] that we are also there for them,” McCandless said. “The best power that comes in terms of helping a young person reach their aspirations is when we’ve created a real, honest-to-goodness partnership that exists between school and home.”
