FARMINGTON — After two decades as principal of W.G. Mallett School, Tracy Williams retired at the end of the 2024-25 school year, leaving behind what she describes as a community built on shared purpose and care.

Williams said her guiding vision was to build a workplace that inspired both staff and students.

“I wanted to create a place where I wanted to go to work every day, and that’s what I wanted staff to feel,” she said in an Aug. 22 interview. “The last thing you want is someone showing up counting down the years until retirement. I think the majority of the staff have wanted to be at work, despite having some hard days.”

She credited the staff with much of the school’s success. Hiring, she noted, has always involved a team approach.

“People over time have gotten to be very intentional about the colleagues they wanted to have to continue and that would actually believe in working the way they wanted to work,” she said. But the pool of candidates has shrunk over the years. “When I started we would have almost 100 applicants for an open teaching position … and now there can be so few applicants, you end up interviewing everyone that has applied in some cases.”

Her own career in education spanned more than four decades. She worked as a speech therapist, taught third and fourth grade in Phillips, and spent nine years with Maine Reading Recovery, traveling the state to train teachers through a collaboration with the University of Maine.

Reading Recovery is a short-term early intervention program designed to help first graders who struggle most with learning to read and write. Before becoming principal, she was based in the Belfast district, combining school-based work with graduate-level instruction.

Recognition followed. In 2015 she was named Maine’s Elementary Principal of the Year. The following year, Mallett School was nominated for the Roland E. Lynch Award by the Maine Education Association. The Lynch Award is given annually to schools in Maine that demonstrate outstanding efforts in fostering positive learning environments and advancing public education.

“That was an interesting experience; got to go to Washington, I met the other principals from New England, and there is a group of us who have remained friends over time,” Williams said of her 2015 recognition. “You share these experiences as a principal that sometimes other people in that role can really understand, especially the parts that are stressful and hard.”

Asked what advice she has for her successor, incoming principal Stacey Gilbert, Williams said patience and humility are essential.

“When you go into a new school that you haven’t been teaching in, most of the people working there know more than you do about everything so they almost have to coach you along,” she said. “You also have to be pretty humble about the fact that you really can’t go in and make a lot of changes because you just don’t know the environment yet.”

Though she is stepping away from daily responsibilities in Regional School Unit 9, Williams plans to continue mentoring new administrators through the Maine Principals’ Association, something she has done for nearly a decade.

“You become someone they can call,” she said. “I have had someone call me in distress when a really difficult thing happened, and you become a person they can talk it through with.”

Looking ahead, she said she hopes parent involvement at Mallett will grow through a group now known as Friends of Mallett.

“I think that is kind of the heartbeat of a community … having parents engaged in school,” she said. “There is definitely a small core group of parents who regularly get involved, but when you compare that to the size of Mallett, it is a lot smaller than it used to be.”

As she settles into retirement, Williams said she misses preparing for the school year but is grateful for the relationships formed.

“I learned a lot along the way and I’m grateful … I’m really going to miss everybody,” she said. “I have had so many great moments, exciting times seeing them learning and growing. I’m definitely going to miss all of that.”

She plans to spend much of October traveling out West and has smaller trips and projects planned. “Summer has felt different. It hasn’t felt like I retired,” she said. “My mind is not doing that this year. I’m working on my garden and things like that.”