BY DARRELL HALEN

Students at Pelham High School won’t see their new assistant principal, Leland Brennan, only during school days.

They’ll see him watching football games, attending school plays and at many other student activities.

Brennan, 63, doesn’t believe in disappearing from school when the last bell rings and then not being seen until the next day.

Rather, it’s important, he said, that he’s an integral part of the school.

“You need to immerse yourself, be part of it,” Brennan said. “Kids need to know who you are. That you’re not a person they just see when they’re late for class, cut class. You’re a person who’s out there and has their best interests at heart.”    

In his new job, Brennan will handle the bulk of student disciplinary issues, and he will carry out several other duties, including helping perform teacher evaluations, assisting with building operations and working with club advisers.

He brings experience working in four high schools, including 16 years as an assistant principal.

“I think he’s a nice addition,” said Dr. Dorothy Mohr, the school’s principal. “He’s enthusiastic and he comes with some good experiences.”

Brennan, whose father served in the Air Force, attended approximately 12 schools before entering high school. He graduated from Winnacunet High School in Hampton after his father became the traffic manager at Pease Air Force Base.

He received a bachelor of science degree in biology and health and physical education at Moorhead State University in Minnesota in 1967. He taught a year at Billerica High School before a three-year stint in the Army, including a year in Vietnam.

Brennan taught at Winnacunet for two years, and spent three years at Triton Regional High School in Byfield, Mass., before a federal grant enabling him to teach remedial math dried up.

He then joined the staff at Whittier Regional Vocational Technical High School in Haverhill, Mass., in 1975. He taught biology before becoming dean of students, an assistant principal position, in 1988.

Brennan said he has a history of being active with kids – something he shared with the selection committee in Pelham that interviewed him and wanted to know how he gets to know students.

“I’m out in the hallways all the time. I go to the football games, I go the basketball games. I see them in the clubs. I go to the plays and do as many things as I can, be involved.”

Brennan’s background includes coaching and he loves high school sports. He holds a master’s degree in public administration, an education he got on the G.I. bill, from Golden Gate University in San Francisco.

He obtained a certificate of advanced graduate studies in educational leadership at Suffolk University in Boston. As an assistant principal, he felt he could be of service to students and faculty, he said.

He retired from Whittier in 2004, but went back to the school three times to help on an interim basis.

“What I found out was, I wasn’t ready to retire,” said Brennan, who lives in Hampton with his wife, Sharon Rafferty, and has two grown children from a previous marriage. “I enjoyed being back in school, with kids.”

One of his first job interviews was for the Pelham position. What appealed to him about Pelham was his experience attending the Dan Gionet Memorial Tournament at the school last winter. The wrestling tournament is named after the Army soldier, a 2001 graduate of the school, who was killed in Iraq.

“What caught me was how nicely it was done,” said Brennan, who was the assistant wrestling coach for the Whittier team at the time. “I really got a sense there was a real connect between the community, the parents, all the people who came to honor that young man and the school. It was really special that the school would do that. The way it was done really impressed me."