ORLEANS — The Nauset Regional School Committee and members of the four town elementary school committees that make up the Nauset district voted unanimously last week to offer the superintendent’s job to Glenn Brand, the superintendent of Wilmington Public Schools, over two other candidates.
Pending agreement on a contract, which Brand and the school committee were scheduled to negotiate in executive session on Feb. 5, Brand will take over the position from retiring Supt. Brooke Clenchy on July 1.
“What stood out was his experience,” NRSC chair Judy Schumacher told the Independent, citing Brand’s previous position as superintendent of the regional Acton-Boxborough district, his work on strategic planning and finance, and his being a resident of Cape Cod.
Brand, 54, is from Ontario and has lived in Massachusetts for most of his career in public schools. He currently lives in Dennis but keeps an apartment closer to Wilmington where he spends the work week. Brand said he and his family had already set their sights on the Cape when his daughter, who was going to a private high school — an “interesting scenario” for someone who had spent his entire childhood and career in public schools, he said — decided she wanted to go back to public school.
“There was no other front-runner at all as we came to recognize Nauset,” Brand said of their school selection process. “The only regret is that she didn’t join as a 9th-grader.”
Brand will be leaving Wilmington with a year left on his contract but said he had “zero reason” to want to leave the district and indicated during interviews his interest in staying at Nauset long-term. He was not considering any other jobs, he said, and sees the Nauset position as “an opportunity to really become a full member of the Cape Cod community.”
This apparently sat well with members of NRSC and School Union #54, the 12-member body composed of three members from each of Nauset’s elementary school committees that joins the NRSC to vote on superintendency matters. Throughout about half an hour of discussion following final interviews with each of the three candidates, members of the two committees heaped praise on Brand and on James “Kimo” Carter, the current assistant superintendent of Weston Public Schools, but concluded that the latter did not have enough experience for the Nauset job.
Brand’s résumé says he started as a teacher and later assistant principal in Peel, Ontario before moving to Massachusetts in 2004 and becoming assistant principal at Mattacheese Middle School in Yarmouth. Since then, he has been a principal in Wareham and in Needham, then became assistant superintendent for administration and finance in Sharon and held his first superintendent job in Acton-Boxborough starting in July 2014.
Brand’s time at Acton-Boxborough ended with the district buying him out of the remainder of his contract — an entire year — which generated public outrage. An online petition demanding that the school committee explain its rationale for the agreement with Brand attracted 1,120 signatures, but the Independent could not find any record that the committee released that information. Brand would not offer any specifics about the circumstances of his departure.
Though still waiting to confirm contract details, Brand said he is glad to have a few months of “on-ramp” before him to begin integrating into his new position. He intends to spend the time working with Clenchy and members of the school committee to determine priorities and develop a list of people with whom to connect come July.
Brand will come to the Nauset district at a time when most of its schools are facing declining enrollment driven by an outmigration of school-aged families. This spring, Brewster, Orleans, and Eastham will begin a study of potential regionalization of the towns’ elementary schools — Wellfleet, the remaining town in the district, has still not committed to joining that study.
Enrollment is not the only challenge Brand will inherit. Regarding bullying and hate in public schools, Brand listed two recent training sessions on the topic on his résumé and said he takes a “proactive” approach to addressing such incidents but did not respond to a request to see evidence of his work in this area.
In 2021, federal investigators concluded that the Nauset district had failed to follow its own policies regarding a student who faced documented anti-Semitic harassment from peers and faculty. The faculty and school committee were never informed about the bullying, which was effectively covered up by then-Supt. Thomas Conrad.
Brand said he is “carefully monitoring” developments from the federal government in public school funding and policy now that President Trump has taken office. Though he acknowledged it is hard to anticipate what changes could be coming, the president’s actions so far have him concerned that some could have “very accelerated timelines.”
