HILLTOWNS — Just weeks after Berne-Knox-Westerlo secondary-school principal Mark Pitterson announced his retirement, the district’s board of education appointed his replacement from within the school’s ranks: English teacher Bonnie Kane. 

Kane, 36, has a bachelor’s degree in English from the State University at Oneonta and a master’s degree from the University at Albany, along with a certificate of advanced study in educational leadership from SUNY Stony Brook. She began working for BKW in 2016, but, she said, has been an educator for 16 years. 

“Interestingly, my family has a deep history with BKW that I was not fully aware of until after my employment with the district began,” she said. “My sister briefly served as Business Manager, but my husband’s grandmother taught in the district for the majority of her career.  Similarly, my husband’s uncle, Perry Kane, served the district for over thirty years as a business teacher and business administrator before retiring in 1995.”

In addition to teaching, Kane is a career and college readiness coordinator at the district, whose responsibility is, essentially, to provide students with opportunities to develop skills and find experience they’ll need after high school.

In that role, Kane is privy to what students’ ambitions are, although, she said, they’re too varied to easily summarize. 

“We have students who are interested in pursuing software engineering opportunities, we have students who are interested in wildlife conservation, or environmental conservation,” she said. “We have students interested in starting their own business … I haven’t really noticed a common theme or trend. I think it’s really refreshing that students have that understanding that there’s quite a few careers out there that they can kind of choose for themselves.”

As principal, she said she’s “really looking forward to the opportunity to bring even more educational opportunities to our students. That’s one of my main points, to try and help every student understand and appreciate how their work in high school relates to what they’re going to do for their future careers and how they are going to positively contribute to our society.”

While Kane was in the process of getting her administrative certification, she interned under Pitterson and Superintendent Timothy Mundell, she said. “So I do have experience with the ways in which they do things and how things are run.”

Mundell told The Enterprise this week that the school has begun focusing more and more on its own staff as it considers new generations of administrators, and changed its hiring policy to make it easier for the board to hire those candidates.

“We know from prior searches, and from networking with colleagues in the field, that candidate pools are very thin,” Mundell said. “In the last two years we have also seen several staff members in our system undertake steps toward administrative certification. As a system, we have supported their individual efforts and we encourage their leadership and administrative growth. 

“As we supported individuals in this way, we saw a potential pathway to succession planning as a process for growing candidates internally to become the next generation of leaders. Nearly a year ago, the Board made changes to its hiring policy to reflect this thought process.”

And, for this particular role, Mundell said, Kane emerged as the best fit to replace Pitterson, whom the district had learned “several months ago” was thinking about retirement.

“With a seamless hand off, entering the role knowing our students and families, and already being engaged in the work of program development and supporting staff, she will be able to continue the work effectively, thus maintaining the leadership stability defined in the core values.” 

Before the board appointed Kane at its Feb. 28 meeting, school board President Matthew Tedeschi and other members of the board also explained why it chose to consider an insider instead of seeking elsewhere.

“One way to maintain stability is to promote people who are quite capable … from within,” Tedeschi also said. “You don’t have that learning process. They understand the identity and the direction that you’re going … I know all of us are pretty excited about this direction and feel confident that Bonnie is going to do a great job for the district.”

The motion to appoint Kane, with a $105,000 annual salary, passed unanimously.