Meet Brenda Kelley of Lenox, Massachusetts’ elementary principal of the year

After another brutal news week, we’re happy to say it’s time for the Joy Beat. This week, we’re celebrating the leaders in education who run the whole operation — the leaders at the top who put out all the fires, untangle administrative snafus and preside over kid drama: elementary school principals.

Brenda Kelley, principal of Morris Elementary School in Lenox, was recently crowned the Massachusetts School Administrators Association’s Elementary Principal of the Year. She joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to the joy she brings — and receives — at her school. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

Arun Rath: Congratulations!

Brenda Kelley: Thank you! I mean, as principals across Massachusetts and across the country, we don’t do the work alone; we do it with our staff. This award is representative of all the staff I’ve led over my years as a principal.

Rath: That’s an important and generous thing to say, as well. Going back to how you got into this, I mean, elementary school principal — it’s such a formative time for young kids. There’s a tremendous amount of pressure, and I know it can’t be an easy one. When was it you decided that you wanted to be a principal, and when did you realize what it would entail?

Kelley: If I can go back a little to my career in education: I have always known I’ve wanted to impact the lives of children. Growing up, I was like, “I want to be a teacher!” So I went to school. And then I started out on that career path — I was actually a reading specialist, which is an amazing job to watch the growth in young children as they learn the difficult task of reading.

I started having leadership roles in my elementary school, and one thing led to another, and I was asked to become the principal of another elementary school within Berkshire County.

Having this job allows you to interact with every person who touches the lives of students. Nowadays, families are busy, and some of our students are here within our building for long periods of time. So, if I can make the adults in the building happy — and this is the Joy Beat — that translates down to the students.

Rath: It sounds like your experiences as a teacher really inform your work as a principal.

Kelley: Yes. I started out as a fourth-grade teacher in a parochial school, and then I moved to the public school system, where I was a reading specialist for 12 years. Then, I became the principal of an elementary school, so this is my 11th year as an elementary school principal.

Rath: We’ll talk about the pandemic in a moment, but: Pandemic aside, what have been the biggest challenges and learning experiences you’ve had along the way?

Kelley: I would say that when you are in this role, as I stated earlier, you are managing your staff, there’s the management of students, and then there’s the families. It’s a time-consuming job, on top of making sure that you have all your state paperwork completed and the expectations of the district done. So it’s just being able to make sure that you’re managing your time wisely.

For me, it’s extremely important to make sure that I am in classrooms, visiting students, visiting with my staff in the lunch room and attending after-school functions if necessary, just to make sure that I have all eyes — a 360 view — of what is happening at my school.

Rath: You talked about bringing to all that a kind of positivity, a joy to it, because of the nature of education and the kids at this age. That sounds like it takes an awful lot of energy.

Kelley: I think if you’re a generally positive person, you’re able to find the positive, even in the most stressful of times. I like to greet my children, I like to greet my staff, I always have a smile on my face — I generally try to have a smile on my face.

Our days are long days. Days can be tough. But every day, there’s something positive happening within a school building, whether it’s a child who learned how to pronounce a word that they were unfamiliar with and was able to read a sentence that they weren’t able to read, or out on the playground — maybe two students who might have had a peer conflict and work through that.

There’s always something happy and positive happening within an elementary school across the state of Massachusetts and across the country, it’s just your viewpoint.

Rath: Was there a moment or a memory that you have with a student that kind of solidified that this is what you were meant to do?

Kelley: Oh, I would say there are many, many moments. Just most recently, winning this award, there are news publications that have gone out. I recently had a student email me who is a junior in high school. He had some struggles growing up, going through his elementary school. He just sent me an email congratulating me on my award — and then apologized for some of the struggles he had in elementary school.

I wrote back, and I said, “There’s no need to apologize. We all have struggles — I have struggles on a daily basis.” I’m actually going to go watch him play tennis in a week. The impact that we have on our students — I don’t think we realize, sometimes, how impactful our presence is when we interact with our students.

Rath: Wow. I mean, that’s a really special kind of joy seeing what these young people go on to do.

Kelley: Yeah. For me, I have a special place in my heart for those students who sometimes have some challenges. I was telling my staff the other day that I ran into another student, even before this award was announced, who had certain challenges. It just so happened to be that I was her first customer at her job. You could see that she was really nervous, and I was like, “We got this. You know me!”

I ran into her again, and she just told me that she’s going into the field of education, which is great because we need teachers. We need teachers — there’s a teacher shortage right now, and we need teachers.

Rath: Let’s talk about the pandemic, because this is a demanding job in the best of times. I had kids that were in middle school and high school — it would seem the elementary school kids might have had the worst to deal with because older kids were able to, at least, communicate with their friends electronically.

Kelley: Right. So, I became principal at Morris Elementary School during the pandemic. That was for me — as an adult — scary. I left a school building where I was really comfortable, and I went to a new district, a new school building where I didn’t know anybody. My first meeting with my staff was on Zoom.

Like any teacher in elementary school, the first thing I did was read them the picture book: “What Do You Do With a Chance?” That book is about getting brave and taking chances. When you do that, amazing things happen. We work together, and we work through the challenges of the pandemic.

I would say some of the challenges that we had during that time made the staff better educators. We focused in our instruction to really meet the needs of our learners, and they did a fantastic job. I’m really grateful for the staff at Morris Elementary School. They trusted me, and it shows each and every day in our students.

If you’d like to nominate someone or something for the Joy Beat, leave us a voicemail at 617-300-BEAT (2328).