GUILDERLAND — “I’ve always been open to wherever the road takes me,” says Daniel Mayberry, who was appointed as Guilderland’s superintendent of schools on May 14.

The school board’s vote was unanimous and Mayberry was warmly greeted on Wednesday evening by school leaders, students, the town’s supervisor, and the director of the Guilderland Public Library.

After 14 years at the helm, Marie Wiles announced in October that she would retire in June, sparking a sixth-month search for a new superintendent.

Fifteen people applied, which was winnowed to four finalists, school board President Blanca Gonzalez-Parker told The Enterprise.

“We felt that he was the best qualified,” she said, adding, “For me, personally, I felt he was the most student-centric and personable.”

Mayberry has a three-year contract that starts on Aug. 1. He will be paid $225,000 annually.

“I know nothing in life is certain,” Mayberry told The Enterprise in a Thursday morning interview. “So you just have to be open, when it’s time, to do what you need to … I need something different. I need a different challenge.”

Leading the Guilderland schools will, indeed, be different from Mayberry’s work for the last 11 years as superintendent of Keene Central.

That Adirondack school has 166 students in kindergarten through 12th grade who attend class in a single, cupola-topped traditional red brick building. Guilderland serves close to 5,000 students in five neighborhood elementary schools that feed into a massive middle school and a sprawling high school — all on separate campuses in the suburban town. 

Keene Central has proposed a roughly $9 million budget for next year while Guilderland has proposed a $128 million budget.

Mayberry, who is 52, has spent his entire life in the Adirondacks. “I want to learn. I want to figure out new things,” he said.

Mayberry was attracted to Guilderland, he said, because it is a “very supportive school district. It’s large and there’s a lot of diversity. There’s a lot of opportunities for kids.”

Lake Placid, where Mayberry himself went to school and later taught, and Keene each have over 90 percent white students while Guilderland has just 68 percent white students and is becoming more diverse. While Keene has no students learning English as a new language, Guilderland has 241.

Asked his view on Guilderland’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the wake of federal administration threats to cut funding to districts with DEI programs, Mayberry said, “I think DEI programs are critically important to school districts. I firmly believe if we as humans all treated everyone respectfully and well and embraced our differences, I think we shouldn’t need it as a culture, but we definitely need it.

“And I think it’s important that our students grow up in an environment in which they’re accepted and that they’re honored for who they are and what they are. And I think DEI is critically important to our future society …. The Trump administration, unfortunately, is causing some stress in schools in states like New York, but New York state has our back.”

He added that, to avoid federal funding cuts, the district might change the name of its DEI program. “You don’t have to change the practices of DEI, or the things that you’re doing,” he said, “but maybe there’s a way to get creative with what the things are called that wouldn’t eliminate the funding.”

Looking back

Mayberry, who grew up in Lake Placid in a family of six, always liked school. His father worked as a mechanic and his mother a medical transcriptionist.

“I very much wanted to know. I wanted to make connections. I wanted to figure things out,” he said. “So, school was interesting to me.”

He has known the woman who became his wife, Ashleah, since they were 3 because their families lived near one another. They both graduated from Lake Placid High School at the same time but weren’t romantically involved until, at age 24, Daniel Mayberry went to a Halloween party hosted by Ashleah.

He dressed as the Cryptkeeper from the kids’ TV horror show, Tales of the Crypt. “I just wore a suit with a mask … nobody knew who I was,” he said. “We just started hanging out after that and it blossomed from there.”

The Mayberrys have two grown children, both Lake Placid High School graduates: Jacob, 18, who is in the United States Marines, and Brooklyn, 21 who lives in Phoenix, Arizona where he is “training for his passion of baseball” supporting himself by doing remote computer programming.

“I’m very proud of my children,” said Mayberry.

Ashleah Mayberry is the executive director of the Adirondack Film Society and is hoping to continue her work remotely as the couple looks for a residence in Guilderland, Mayberry said.

When Daniel Mayberry was in the sixth grade, the seed was planted for his career by his teacher, Mrs. Ott. “She was energetic, happy, engaging …. You learned but you knew that she cared about you,” he said.

Asked about his interests in music or sports, Mayberry said, “I primarily worked so I didn’t have a lot of school-based interests.”

He started working in elementary school with a route delivering the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, a job that lasted through ninth grade when he started getting work in restaurants, which carried him through college.

He went to the State University of New York at Potsdam, thinking at first he wanted to be a history teacher. “But then I thought to myself, ‘What subject do you really like, that you look up answers to?’ — and it always came back to science.”

After he graduated with a degree in biology and secondary education, his first job was part-time at his alma mater. He taught a general science class and then was hired to be the middle-school science teacher, a job he held for 15 years.

“It was comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time,” Mayberry said of starting his teaching career at the school he’d attended. “It was comfortable because I knew the building … It was uncomfortable working alongside all of my former teachers as a colleague.”

Although the transition was “a little weird,” he said of his colleagues, “They were fantastic.”

He had admired his high school biology teacher, Frank Johns, and envisioned following in his footsteps. “But I got hired in the middle school and I fell in love with that age group,” said Mayberry.

He liked the excitement and “never knowing what each day would bring.” Middle-school students are independent and want to learn, he said, but, after years in the job, he worried that the subject matter would come to bore him.

“Let’s be honest, the foundation of science doesn’t change very often … When you get into the upper level of science, that’s where you get into the new advancements.”

Mayberry thought to himself, “I want to be fresh and energized in 20 years.”

We went to the State University of New York at Plattsburgh to earn a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction in 1998 and later a Certificate of Advanced Study in educational leadership and administration.

He became dean of students and assistant principal at Lake Placid in 2010, which he called an “interesting transition." The students who were sent to his office were often angry, Mayberry said. His approach was “to help them work through that, process it, and really examine their own accountability.”

He would ask a student sent to his office, “If you could go back and do it again, would you do anything differently?”

Mayberry saw his role as less punitive and more educational. “It’s about having them solve the problem that was leading to those issues of why they were showing up in my office.”

Mayberry decided to apply to be principal at nearby Keene Central “for my family and my health … I needed to do something different,” he said.

He had a lot to learn, since he was unfamiliar with the elementary grades, he said. After just two years, he became superintendent, which also included the duties of being the district’s financial officer.

“It’s like drinking from a firehouse,” Mayberry said of all he had to absorb. “Colleagues in other school districts were immensely helpful.”

Looking ahead

After 11 years at the helm in Keene, Mayberry says he is up for a new challenge.

“I’m not afraid of change,” he said, “and I’m not afraid of new things. I like to keep myself excited and committed to the work that I’m doing …. I have a firm belief that everything will work out, that things happen for a reason. And everything that happens leads you to where you are and where you’re going to go.”

Asked what goals he has for the district, Mayberry said, “I am coming in wanting to really get to know and learn Guilderland, how it functions, what works, what are the priorities, what are the things that are highly successful, and many are obvious, but what things might we need to work on.

“And the only way to do that is to get to know the district itself and then make a decision as to how we are going to change or move forward.”

Mayberry told the school board members after they voted to hire him, that he felt like he was starting his educational experience all over again.

“I have to learn the people, the place, the operation, build all the relationships,” he told The Enterprise.

Asked how long he plans to stay, Mayberry said, “Since this is such a big change in my life, there’s just an open road after that so I’m going to see how it goes. I hope to build a beautiful relationship with Guilderland and that we help each other move forward in whatever ways we need to and wherever that road takes me, it takes me.”