A passing of the baton at Christa McAuliffe School

It didn’t take long for Lindsay Nye to fill her new office at Christa McAuliffe School with art, plants and decorations.

The room is bedecked in gifted paintings, a classroom valentine card, a limby monstera plant known to kids as her “monster” and a handmade poster, sparkling with silver glitter, that says she is a “princi-PAL.” It was a pass-down from her successor.

After a year as the school’s interim principal, Nye has been tapped to stay on in that role permanently at Christa McAuliffe School.

While the change was unexpected at first, Nye has loved every day in the job so far, she said.

“The kids are amazing, the teachers – everyone,” she said. “This is my home away from home.”

Just a week before school started in August, Nye shifted into the leadership position at Christa after two years as assistant principal. With the unexpected passing of Concord’s superintendent Kathleen Murphy, then-principal Kris Gallo moved up to Concord High School, as Tim Herbert filled in as superintendent.

Across the district, a tough chapter lies ahead as leaders and staff are faced with deep staff cuts in the proposed budget for next year. Nye knows it won’t be easy on anyone, but she remains determined to support students and teachers through it.

Gallo had intended to step down from her longtime job as principal at Christa before the shakeup over the summer. She felt a sadness in not getting to savor her final year after more than a dozen at the school, but she praised Nye’s experience and demeanor.

“I had the history of knowing people – she spent the last two years really building those relationships,” Gallo said, adding that Nye’s experience in special education has been invaluable. “She was really interviewing all school year this past year, and proved herself to be a very strong leader.”

Nye is a born-and-raised Hennikerite who spent most of her career in her hometown’s local schools. She came into education, however, from the business side.

With her mother as a local teacher and then a professor of education and dean at New England College, Nye’s version of youth rebellion was to pursue a business degree as an undergraduate.

Education got its hooks in her, however, during a college internship at the Henniker school business office. Seeing her childhood teachers as career professionals changed her view.

She quickly followed up with a masters in education and spent fifteen years at Henniker’s elementary school. Much of that time was spent in first-grade classrooms and in special education, but she’s taught kids as old as 13 and as young as three. She left that district as the student services coordinator.

Nye came to Christa in the fall 2023. It had been time to stretch her wings a bit wider, she said. But also, she added, “I have my own girls who are in that late-elementary age, and it wasn’t cool to have mom as an administrator in your school anymore.”

In the last three years, Nye has come to love the McAuliffe School’s culture of camaraderie, where the teachers are innovative and ambitious, and the families are supportive and neighborly.

Gallo, too, was a big part of that. She served as the school’s principal since it opened in 2012 until the start of this year, when she became the interim principal at Concord High. Her bonds to families and staff alike, Nye said, were a model.

“We call her the Yoda,” Nye said. With Gallo’s warmth and connectedness, “She was like unlike anyone I’d ever worked with before.”

Back when she took the job more than a decade ago, Gallo said it was her own young children who had opened her eyes, as a then high school teacher, to her true passion for elementary education.

Recently, though, Gallo got a gut feeling it was time for a new chapter.

“I think when you’re in the same place for a long time, you want to make sure you’re doing the best for the people that you’re leading,” she said. “And I think that I was feeling like I wasn’t sure if I had enough to give anymore.”

It doesn’t mean she’s retiring, she added.

“I’m done in my principal years,” she said. “But I’m not feeling comfortable that I’m done, and I don’t know what that means yet.”

Christa McAuliffe School has a culture of one big, tight-knit family, she said. “People always were looking out for one another to make sure that, not only were the kids okay, but the adults were, too.”

As she looks ahead, Gallo still feels that instinct.

“With the turmoil that we are facing with our budget, for me, the feeling hasn’t been, ‘Oh, thank God, I’m out of here,’” she said. “The feeling is actually the opposite. I feel like I’m needed in some respect, and that I can help. I don’t know how I’m needed or how I can help yet. But I just have a sense that, this is my community and I don’t feel comfortable leaving it like this right now.”

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