by Marty Green
Barring any snags in the paperwork, Dr. Joseph Connelly will be the interim superintendent of schools for Harvard for the 2011-12 school year. At a morning meeting on Saturday, March 19, the School Committee voted to offer Connelly the position, and he accepted by noon of that day. The decision is contingent upon reaching agreement on a contract and also upon receiving a critical-need waiver from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). (The waiver is necessary because Connelly is retired.)
Connelly, who is currently serving as the interim superintendent of the 3,200-student Gloucester school system, has worked in half a dozen Massachusetts school districts in a career spanning more than 40 years. Beginning as a middle-school math and science teacher in Wilmington, he went on to become principal first of the elementary school and then of the middle school in that district. In 1986, he became superintendent in the Tri-Town School Union (Topsfield, Boxford, and Middleton), a position he held for a decade. He then spent another decade as superintendent in the Stoneham Public Schools. Since his retirement from that post, he has held interim positions in Berlin, Boylston, Brookline, and Gloucester.