The Bromfield School’s new principal, starting July 1, will be Kimberley Murphy, a former French teacher who is currently assistant principal at Chelsea High School. At Monday’s School Committee meeting, student representative Asha Khurana summed up the reaction in school, saying, “The new principal announcement is the talk of the town.”
School Superintendent Linda Dwight announced Murphy’s selection in a March 4 email to school families. Murphy was one of two finalists selected from an original pool of more than two dozen applicants.
Kim Murphy. (Courtesy photo)
Chelsea High has more than 1,500 students, nearly three times as many as Bromfield. When asked about coming to a much smaller school, Murphy told the Press, “I’m really excited about getting to know all the students and their families.”
Murphy said she is also enthusiastic about the continuity of curriculum that is possible at Bromfield, with both the middle school and high school together in one building. Chelsea is strictly a high school, with grades 9 through 12.
Murphy will succeed Scott Hoffman, who has been Bromfield’s principal since 2016 and a member of the school’s faculty since 1987. Hoffman announced last October that he planned to retire at the end of this school year.
Murphy has nearly 20 years’ experience as a teacher and administrator. She began her career teaching French in her native New Hampshire from 2003 to 2013, first in Concord and then Laconia.
In 2013, Murphy moved to Massachusetts to teach in Chelsea, where she became French department leader. She began the transition to administration soon afterward.
Describing her move into administration, Murphy said, “I’m a planner. I like to do things with a lot of thought.” Her first step was a one-year practicum that allowed her to shadow the principal while still teaching French. Then she spent a year as a principal intern, which she described as sharing all the work of a principal except evaluating teachers. In 2018 she became assistant principal and also completed her master’s degree in education administration at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
While at Chelsea, Murphy has worked closely with the school’s Early College program. She said about 300 Chelsea students take classes at Bunker Hill Community College. These classes help some students get comfortable with the idea of going to college. The college credits they earn in high school can also help them complete their college degrees in a shorter time.
In 2020 Murphy was named a MassINC Gateway Cities award winner for her role in building the Early College program at Chelsea. In describing her work, MassINC wrote, “The exposure to college life and the significant number of college credits they earn for free while still in high school has made it more than twice as likely that these Chelsea High students will be the first in their families to earn a college degree.”
After a decade in Massachusetts, Murphy says she feels at home here. She and her wife, who is from Massachusetts, live in Watertown with their three teenage children.
Murphy says one of her favorite activities is taking her family to museums, most often the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. As an undergraduate at Skidmore College, French was her minor, and she spent a semester in France. But she majored in art history. “Art history is the illustrated version of history,” she says.
