Written by Sequoyah Kingsbury
As you all know, GM gained a new principal at the beginning of this year, Lauren Fierman. She is originally from Connecticut but she had gone to Vermont every summer as a child while attending a summer camp. She “thought Vermont was the most wonderful place because that's where all good things happened every summer.” She and her husband knew that Chester was always a place they would end up in the future. Mrs. Fierman decided to apply for the position of principal because our school was diving into a proficiency-based grading and learning. Mrs. Fierman is “a believer in standard space and proficiency-based work.” She had previously spent time learning and studying proficiency-based work and how to apply it. When she had gone on her walk through of the school last year, she thought the school was a “marvelous place to be” and she felt that she “had a good connection to the place.” When asked how she felt about GM, her response was amazing, “Oh, I love it here…” The future of GM is very bright!
Mrs. Fierman feels as if “everything rolled itself out.” The 2018/19 school year began as a Pre K–12th-grade school due to complications at CAES. Mrs. Fierman said, “I was not anticipating being a Pre K - 12 principal… certainly was an awful experience but a good one.” The merging brought the student body together as a whole with the younger kids joining in. A while after the CAES kids and staff had left and once the chaos settled, we were faced with two threats within a week. This was not Mrs. Fierman’s first rodeo when it came to threats of that sort. She had worked in other places that had similar scenarios, but she had never been in a building where the threat was made by someone out of the community. Lauren Fierman believes the staff and students dealt with the situation at hand in a “responsible” manner.
You’ve seen Mrs. Fierman in the halls and classrooms, she may not have been able to get to know the whole student body because “a big push this year was to work with the teachers.” Working with the teachers is normally shared between both the assistant principal and the principal. For next year and the years to come, her “priority is to work making sure [she gets] to know the student body better.” Mrs. Fierman said her year has gone very well!
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