Principal Shawn Parkhurst Says Goodbye to Jerome Harrison

Students at Jerome Harrison Elementary School will be missing a familiar face as they head back to school this fall. Shawn Parkhurst, principal of Jerome Harrison for the past seven years, has stepped down to take a position as the assistant superintendent in Wallingford.

“My passion has always been curriculum and instruction,” said Parkhurst. “I have been tapped for a move to central office a couple times over the years, but didn’t feel I was ready yet and wanted to stay and get the flavor of how to run a building.”

Now after 15 years as a building principal, Parkhurst is ready to follow his passion in a “pretty selective district.” He recently accepted the job after three rounds of interviews of a 10-day period.

While Parkhurst is excited about the next step in his career, leaving his post at Jerome Harrison Elementary School is bittersweet, noting that he’ll miss the relationships he has built with the staff and the students.

“The staff is a unique group that comes together in good times and bad to support each other like a family,” said Parkhurst, who lives in Westbrook with his wife and daughter, who’s entering 5th-grade. “I’ll miss interacting with the students every day, but I will be spending a lot of time in the schools.”

The “cutting edge integration and use of technology” in the classrooms is one of the things Parkhurst implemented at JHS that he’s most proud of. When he started, there were a few Smartboards in the school and now there is one in every classroom. The school also has 100 student-use iPads.

Parkhurst said that for the 2013-14 school year, there will be two classrooms – a 1st-grade and a 2nd-grade class – that will have a 1:1 student to iPad ratio with much of the classwork to be performed on the iPads.

“I hope the staff will continually challenge themselves to use technology as a productivity tool and I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished so far,” said Parkhurst, who enjoys reading, traveling, the beach and trying his hand at golf when he’s not at work. “I look forward to watching the progress with technology from the peripheral."

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